The Moto Z4 launches as a $500 mid-range smartphone with 5G upgradability

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  The Moto Z4, featuring the return of the headphone jack! Motorola provided this loving render of the phone on top of a tangle of headphone wire. [credit:
  Motorola ]

Motorola announced its latest flagship smartphone, or at least the highest-end phone the company bothers to make anymore. The Moto Z4 is a mid-range Snapdragon 675-powered device that will launch June 13 on Verizon for $499.99.

The phone still supports MotoMods. Motorola has been chained to its modular ecosystem for four generations now, which has limited what it can do in terms of phone design. MotoMod compatibility means the phones all have to essentially share the same body, so the Z2, Z3, and Z4 are all stuck coloring within the lines set up by the original Moto Z, which were laid out in 2016.

The frozen-in-time design has created an issue with regard to the fingerprint sensor, since the original Moto Z had a front-mounted fingerprint reader. As time went by, slimming front bezels and the demand for bigger screens meant fingerprint readers needed to be relocated, but Motorola couldn’t put it on the back fo the phone like everyone else, because it would be blocked by the clip-on MotoMods. With the Z3, the company finally came up with a creative solution in the form of a side-mounted fingerprint reader. For the Z4, Motorola’s strange design problems are solved: it has an optical in-screen fingerprint reader, which is quickly becoming a standard phone feature.