The smartphone market is completely saturated with smartphones from dozens of manufacturers with mainly three operating systems on them: iOS from Apple, Android from Google and Windows for Phone by Microsoft. For the majority of people when asked ‘what is the best smartphone out there?’ they will reply with the iPhone 6/6S or the Samsung Galaxy S7/S7 Edge. This is understandable since both companies have good reputations for making market leading smartphones. However, after using and testing the majority of smartphones out there, there seems to be a smartphone that has surprised myself more than the flagships – this is the Moto X Play from Lenovo. Why has it been such a pleasant surprise? Well, my friend, here are some of the main reasons why the Moto X Play is a great smartphone worth buying.

To help you understand my thought process, it may be worth reading a few past articles I have done on smartphones such as:

• 3 Areas Smartphones Can Still Improve
• Must Have Features Of Smartphones in 2015
• Is The LG G Flex 2 Actually A Good Smartphone?

#1 3630mAh Battery

By far one of the best features of the Moto X Play is the incredibly large battery Motorola have fitted into the smartphone. With battery drainage becoming a constant problem as phones become thinner and thinner, it is incredible that Motorola have got a battery capacity that is sometimes double that of competitors. All in all, this means the battery life of the Moto X Play can last a full two days of normal use.

#2 Stock Android

Motorola have used ‘stock Android’ as one of their unique selling points. After all, this is exactly how the Nexus line-up gains sales.

Moto do use stock Android with some very small tweaks to improve the user experience. These tweaks are not evasive and do not change any part of the experience of stock Android.

However, the great thing about Motorola adopting stock Android is the fact that you know the phone will be fast for as long as you own it. It is far too common for Android phones to slow down after 6 months because of the ridiculous skins OEMs have put over Android to ‘improve the UI’…

#3 Great Value

The Moto X Play is a 1080p 5.5 inch phone with stock Android, a micro SD card slot (up to 128GB that can be treated by the OS as ‘internal storage’) and a generally great design. For this, you would think that it would be up there with the S6/7 by Samsung or Apple’s iPhone 6/6s range. However, it is priced at around half of the price of Samsung and Apple flagship phones. Above everything, it is extremely good value which will definitely attract many people to buying it – especially Pokémon fans that want large battery capacities to let them play Pokémon Go all day!