Wednesday 14 February 2018

A Moto Z Play Camera issue meant a replacement device for me.

Just the other day i was looking through the photos from my Moto Z Play and noticed in every photo that there were 3 little black splodges, two of which were about a few pixels wide and one a bit larger. Once you notice them, you cannot unsee them in almost every rear camera photo. I looked back through my photos and found that it started happening on December the 4th last year. The last time I had an issue like this it was with the Sony Z3 I had ever so briefly before returning it. I had my Z Play since late November. I had to go through all my photos on my hard drive and edit out the spodges. It's harder to do this in Google Photos or Flickr since you essentially have to end up replacing the images, so I mainly resorted to cropping the marks out, as they are all fairly close to the edge of the photos. There's still a few on both that I have not replaced or fixed yet.


Today I returned my Z Play to CEX and luckily they had a white Z Play in the shop window to replace it with. Though I'm not keen on white usually, it is growing on me, it reminds me of the white front of the second gen X that I had a while back. The back doesn't matter since I always keep my phones in a case.


It is the dual SIM version, and in better condition than my old one. No massive scratches on the glass back on this one, and unusually has the original unused earbuds in a bag in the box. Not that I would use those, I much prefer either my AKAI Bluetooth/wired ones or my LG buds. It didn't have the original charger but they helpfully swapped it with the original one from the one I returned.


Once I got home, I restored all my apps and settings from Google, (apart from Google Camera since the latest version is Oreo only, so I had to find an older version on APK Mirrror) and restored my Nova Launcher settings from a backup off my SD card, along with the Google Now Companion. I have tried lots of launchers but always end up back on Nova. I also paired and setup my Pebble and Bluetooth headphones. Oh and I also had to download and install 3 security updates to get it up to the December Security Patch level. So far it has been trouble free, hopefully I shall keep this phone for awhile, for as long as it gives me no problems.



Update 22/006/2018 - I've just got the official Oreo update on my Z Play

No comments: