Motorola hopes to build an ecosystem around Moto Mods and is encouraging developers to produce their own. It joins LG and Google in trying a modular approach.Now that innovation thing? Smartphone accessories are nothing new of course but by developing a simple, consistent system for swapping add-ons, Motorola's pitch is that you can keep your handset fresh and supply new features only if and when you need them. If Motorola or its rivals are successful with this approach, that engenders brand loyalty.But the first batch of Moto Mods, however capable, speak more to the potential of the modular concept rather than by any immediate necessity to own any.Of course, before you can even begin to judge whether such an ecosystem is worth buying into, you’ve got to evaluate the Droid’s on their own merits. Fortunately, the two Android handsets check off most of the boxes.

These are snappy, metal slabs, with superb cameras, long-lasting batteries with fast charging, fingerprint sensors, and lovely 5.5-inch Quad HD displays. You can get them with 32GB or 64GB of storage and expand those totals via optional SD memory cards.Motorola says the Moto Z is the thinnest premium smartphone on the market, something to consider since Moto Mods will add to the thickness. The Moto Z Force is already a thicker device, but what you get in return is an even better camera (21 megapixels versus 13), even longer battery (up to 40 hours versus 30 according to Motorola) and a shatterproof screen. I intentionally dropped the Force to verify that claim.

The phones also exploit the USB Type C connector that's not in widespread use yet. There is no headphone jack either, so you must rely on a supplied dongle if you're not using a wireless Bluetooth headset. That’s a bummer.For this review, though, I’m concentrating mainly on the Moto Mod experience. First the good news: You can easily snap on Mods without removing the handset’s battery, or turning the phone on or off. The Mods are held firmly in place by magnets, but not so firmly that you can’t pry them off when you’re ready to try another.The tradeoff: you can only snap on one Moto Mod at a time. They’re small enough to fit into a bag or backpack and I found if you do carry more than one, you can snap them together via their magnets.

To dress up the phones, you can buy what are called Style Shells made from wood, leather or other materials for between $20 and $25.And you can buy $60 to $90 packs that are meant to combine fashion and extra battery life, from the likes of Kate Spade and Tumi. I snapped on a far less fashionable Incipio Offgrid Power Pack.While the phones do boast excellent battery life on their own—and I was able to juice up a Moto Z from zero to a 25% charge after plugging the phone in for just 15 minutes—I suppose you can never have enough power.The JBL SoundBoost Speaker from Harman fetches about $80, though I was pleasantly surprised by how good it sounded. The battery life for the speaker is rated at 10 hours.

Meantime, the Moto Insta-Share Projector, which can project whatever is on the screen of your phone onto a wall—up to about 70-inches--goes for around $300.Motorola appears to be off to a more promising start than rival LG, which introduced optional camera and high-res audio modules for the its own G5 smartphone this past winter. Moto Mods also come ahead of the Project Ara modular phones that Google is developing with industry partners and that may finally show up next year.For its part, Motorola says that the Mods coming out now will remain compatible on its next generation of phones. So in theory anyway, you don't have to worry about obsolescence.

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Of course, if you can change a phone's functionality by adding to the sum of its (removable) parts, you may not have to upgrade so often.Smartphones haven't innovated much lately. Sure, marketing teams are happy to pitch their latest handsets as the second coming of Ghandi, The Beatles and Muhammad Ali rolled into one, but what's really changed in smartphones since the original iPhone in 2007? They're bigger and faster, thinner and lighter, their software is more advanced and they have much better cameras: all welcome advances, but mostly evolutions on what was already in place nine years ago.

Lenovo is the rare smartphone maker willing to take a calculated risk in this space. And that's not just something framed as bold or innovative by marketing departments: We're talking about a real, honest-to-goodness we're throwing in all our chips and doing something completely different kind of move.While the Moto Z and Moto Z Force don't throw out the book on what we expect from a modern-day smartphone, they do add a completely new angle in modularity. And unlike the modular LG G5 we saw earlier this year, this modular phone is simple to use, a piece of cake for anyone to grasp and has loads of potential moving forward.

It works like this: The phones themselves are premium, metallic beauties, not unlike what you'd expect from any other high-end flagship. But their backs have smart sensor coils and strong magnets, which let you attach a Moto Mod of your choice. The mods are accessories that add either a new look or new feature to your smartphone, just by snapping one onto the back. All you do is hold it nearby and let the magnetism pull it perfectly into place.There are three function-based Moto Mods available at launch. Two out of three are pretty niche, but the third is the best solution we've seen for the persistent, seemingly never-ending problem of smartphone battery life. These killer Moto Mods we speak of are called Power Packs. Officially called the Incipio OffGrid mod, there is both a standard version (above) and designer variants made by Tumi and Kate Spade (the former is a standard all-black or all-white, while the latter adds a unique design). They work very similarly to one of those bulky battery cases you'd buy for any other phone, only these don't make your handset look like a pocket-busting tank. Since they don't need to double as a case (and also don't have their own separate charging port), the phones stay pretty slim. A bigger battery is always going to add some bulk (the Incipio pack adds 6.2 mm at its thickest point), but as far as extra batteries go, we think this size is very reasonable.

The beauty is you can have the slim and sexy phone when you want it (the standard Moto Z is an insane 5.2 mm thin, while the Moto Z Force measures a thicker 7 mm). But for times when the need for battery life outweighs the need for light and thin (like, say, during a long day at the office or on a business trip), just snap the power pack mod onto the phone's backside. Shazam – you have an instant 85 percent extra battery life for the Moto Z and 63 percent extra for the Moto Z Force.

And it looks and feels integrated into the phone itself, not like a clunky third-party accessory swallowing your phone whole: Non-modular phones can't do anything like this. None of today's major flagships have what we'd call awesome battery life to start with, and if you want to add more juice to those handsets, your only options are either portable batteries or those tank-like battery cases. With the Moto Z, snapping on what's basically a magnetic backpack for your phone strikes us as the most elegant solution yet.When you need to charge a power pack, just leave it attached to the phone and charge the phone like usual. The phone will juice up first, and then after it hits 100 percent the power pack will fill up. Motorola also added a nice Efficiency Mode feature to Android that gives you the option of only turning on the extra juice when the phone's battery is at 80 percent or less (rather than continuing to charge the phone after it's full).

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From there, the mods start to get a bit more niche. You may read other reviews that mock Lenovo for launching wacky Moto Mods like a projector and a huge, back-facing speaker for your phone, but we're applauding the company instead: not because we have much use for those things, but because the freedom to go niche and wacky is exactly the point of modular smartphones. Somebody out there is going to want this, and when a phone is modular, they can have it – with no harm to the rest of us who don't need it. There's no need to get nerd-raged up over optional accessories that aren't being forced on anyone. The projector mod, officially called the Moto Insta-Share Projector, might be handy if you ever want to show off some vacation photos to a group of friends and don't feel like having them rub their grubby mitts all over your US$600+ smartphone. Or maybe you have a presentation and want to use your handset to power it (do people even do that? ... well, they can now anyway).

It works well, displaying a very projectory image onto a wall (it looks best aimed at a light-colored wall or ceiling in a dark room). You can adjust the focus with a wheel on the mod's side and there's an auto-brightness option for the mod in your phone's settings.Again, this is a Moto Mod I (and probably many others) won't have much need for, especially considering its $300 price tag. But it's part of the versatility and individualization that modular phones can bring to the table. A projector is an option – albeit a wacky, out-of-left-field one – that no other phone gives you.

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