Further updates: I managed to hurt my hand because of the screen width – check out my rant about wide phones here.
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Here are some thoughts after my initial post on the Moto One Zoom now that I’ve had some time to think things over…
Hardware Oversights
I never even mentioned the in-display fingerprint reader, and I stand by this decision because unless these sensors are exceptionally bad, people really don’t care about them. The in-display gimmick is interesting, and probably all phones will have this one day, but it basically does its job. It’s a little slower than others (notably the Note 10) but it gets the job done.
I should also mention that this phone feels more premium than any other Motorola device I’ve held since the Moto X 4, and I really wonder why they didnt just call this phone the Moto X 5. It’s certainly worthy of the title.
That battery drain
I thought I had this one licked with the disabling of the duplicate Moto apps, but there still seems to intermittently be issues with the battery. Shockingly the camera app seems to be what occasionally will knock several percentage points off the battery. Since this is a rather new camera setup for Motorola, I’m not overly worried about this and I’m sure they will push updates in the near future to fix this.
The notch hiding/fingerprint sensor issue
Moto support quickly responded to my initial question, and after I gave them steps to reproduce it said they had opened a bug with their devs. I believe them and having worked in this industry for a long time (maybe too long) I don’t expect some hot fix to be pushed out. Notches are irritating to look at but they don’t make the phone unusable unless you’re Johnny Ive. I don’t know what phone he uses nowadays ?.