Motorola releases Moto Z3 in US and comes with 5G Moto Mod next year jaar

Motorola has announced the Moto Z3 smartphone in the US. The device with Snapdragon 835-soc is sold exclusively at the American provider Verizon. Next year there will be a 5G Moto Mod for the device, which contains a Qualcomm X50 modem.

The Moto Z3 and the 5g accessory are a collaboration of the smartphone manufacturer Qualcomm and the American carrier Verizon. The smartphone itself is a faster variant of the Moto Z3 Play that came out earlier. It has a Snapdragon 835 soc and 4GB of RAM. The 6-inch OLED screen has an 18:9 ratio and a resolution of 2160×1080 pixels. At the back are two twelve-megapixel cameras and the battery has a capacity of 3000mAh.

The device itself does not support 5G networks. Qualcomm has not yet released socs that support it. The manufacturer’s upcoming X50 modem can handle that. Lenovo is going to put that modem in a separate module, which users can click on the back of the Z3 device. This 5G Moto Mod should be available early next year and it will work exclusively on Verizon’s network. The module contains not only a modem, but also a separate SIM card.

Initially, the 5G Moto Mod will only work with the Moto Z3, but according to the product page, support for Moto Z2 variants sold at Verizon will follow later on. It seems that the module only works with provider-specific devices.

The American carriers Verizon and AT&T already want to start offering 5G this year, but they use the 28GHz band for that. It offers high speeds with low latency, but requires larger antennas than currently fit in smartphones. Presumably that is the reason that the 5g connectivity is added with a separate module.