Introduction
Everyone knows that Motorola has to get itself together, as their previous, rock-stable second place has vanished last year. Samsung and LG came and have taken over. Of course not only the growth of these two manufacturers is the reason for this: the bad disposition of the renowned manufacturer was also required.
They have taken the necessary steps inside the company; Motorola’s cell phone department has been detached from the company in order to make it function as a smaller and more effective organization. This is a good step only if they also enhance their portfolio of products at least to the level when a user goes to buy a cell phone he at least considers buying a Motorola. There are a couple of new things coming from overseas (let’s just mention the 5 megapixel ZN5), but these are currently a thing of the future. V8 and V9 were unable to become as successful as V3 and the Q series didn’t destroy all other WM phones either, so they really have to recover.
Until some new stuff arrives Z10, the successor of Z8, can be one of the models that helps Motorola through these difficult times. The specifications of the handset make the impression of a medium-strength phone, plus a banana-like-shape, the first autofocus camera from the company (champagne please!) and the metallic-colored case. Will this be enough for the success?
Exterior
Let’s put it forward: as opposed to all appearances, Z10 is only as metal as Z8 was. This means that only a part of the back is made of this material, every other silvery part is just painted plastic. There might be some metal under the slide, as the clap after closing the phone makes us think this. The weight of the phone has barely increased since Z8, it’s only a couple of grams heavier, but it’s still pretty heavy with 115 grams. The size didn’t change a lot either, so we’ll have to look in other parts for differences.
Sliding the phone open results in the same banana shape that we have seen on the predecessor too. This still impresses people: they want to hold it in their hands, take a look at it and things like this. They also press the buttons, so I’m not the only one to observe that the irregular shape is a bit annoying during typing, but this wasn’t the greatest problem, but the hardness of the keys, as the pressure point is very high, one has to handle Z10 a bit harder than a usual phone.
The shape unfortunately also means that the cover is not very stable. It has quite a lot of play, pressing the top of the handset make the bottom part lift about half a centimeter, which doesn’t really look good, but this design has a price. The spring mechanism, however, is good; this pushes the cover towards the two opposite ends.
Below the display, around the navigation button, there are six keys, these have an unambiguous feature. Call handling, function keys, clear and menu. Below them there is a railed part, but there is no speaker behind it. Motorola usually packs the antenna here, but I can’t say this for sure this time, as I didn’t crush Z10 open with a crowbar. I could have crushed the display, however, as it’s theoretically scratch-resistant, and this might very well be true, as I have been testing it for two weeks and it has been in awkward situations sometimes (threatening car keys were facing it), but it really has no scratches.
On the left there is an engraved Motorola label, volume control keys and the hotkey of the multimedia menu. A bit below there is the microSD card slot. On the right there is only the camera’s exposure key and a conventional miniUSB connector. On top and on the bottom the phone is completely flat.
The back is one of the most interesting parts. The camera is built around the break line and it has a flash too. The cover can be taken off the smaller part of the back: this is where the battery is. Only the center of the cover can be taken off from the other part, this is where we can find the SIM card. The card can be changed without turning the phone off, but upon switching cards the phone will warn us in the menu to restart, or else it won’t connect to the network.
Menu
I have rarely seen such a slow booting handset. It can be turned on with the red button. Of course we instantly have a Hellomoto label and then it takes almost a minute until it begins to respond the increasingly angry keypresses of the user. This all is in spite of the fact that there is a Texas Instruments CPU under the hood, having a clock speed of 300 MHz. There is 64 MB of RAM and 128 MB ROM accompanying the processor, and there is 70 MB of free ROM for the user to fill in with anything he’d like to. If this wouldn’t be enough then Z10 accepts SDHC cards of even 32 gigabytes in size, which provides the necessary storage space for quite a long time.
This is where, based on the specs, we’d expect a nice and fine device, but still, it’s hard to explain the general slow speed of the menu system. The operating system is Symbian, but not with the interface we have seen in Nokia, but based on the UIQ 3.2 platform, which has been developed in cooperation with Sony Ericsson, but it doesn’t use a touchscreen. The punch line is that Sony Ericsson didn’t use this version in any of their models, but it might not be a problem as they have only used 208 MHz CPUs, which couldn’t even provide the speed of a sick snail. What UIQ 3.2 has in plus compared to UIQ 3.1 in Z8 is that it supports push email and it has an integrated Instant Messaging client.
The only complaint we might have about the QVGA display is that it’s a bit small; at least it looks as if there would have been room for a larger one. The main menu still has “only” 16 icons, so we must scroll. The system looks very much like the solution used in Sony Ericsson P1i, which is no wonder. The colors can be set with themes too and it is said that most applications developed for UIQ 3.0 will run on Z10 – that is if they don’t need a touchscreen.
My problem with Z8 was that it rebooted many times, locked up or turned off. This is much less frequent with Z10, but it has happened. It managed to lock up during a call that only taking out and reinserting the battery helped. And that’s when I give up. I take my card and rather put it in a simple phone (which in this case was Samsung M310) and call the person back from that.
Still, Z10’s menu is not bad. It’s useful that we can access the contact list and the new message features directly from the standby screen, we can also use the music player, the calendar and the environmental profiles. The slowdown was very powerful when looking at incoming messages, as this happens this way: the screen lights up and a bit later we can hear the sound effect. One would take the phone in his hands, but nothing is visible yet and then a couple of seconds later the SMS is displayed. I press ok for that and then it starts thinking and the message is displayed by gradually drawing the image. It’s no lightning speed, that’s sure.
Basic functions
I could just say that this part is the same as in Z8, but let’s just take a look at the features. The contact list is great. A contact can have much additional info (name, address, phone numbers, email, picture, ringtone, company, post, birthday, message sound, note), which are displayed on a tabbed interface. Thanks to the dynamic memory the contact list can practically store an infinite number of entries. Unfortunately the caller picture is displayed in a relatively small size in the lower right corner. It’s fortunate that there is a block and an allow list, which is a kind of call filtering method.
Messaging is familiar from Sony Ericsson smartphones. It’s great on software side, but on the hardware part the hard keys unfortunately ruin the experience. There can be no complaints about the iTAP word prediction text entry system, it’s much better than T9. The built-in email client handles attachments too (the limit is 64 MB, but who sends such a large email?) and also supports authenticated SMTP servers.
The calendar is great. Both the month and week views are transparent, and the four types of entries are easy to identify with the help of the icons. Repeating is supported. The alarm clock can have three time points and it works even when the phone is turned off (this isn’t true for all UIQ devices).
The only included game is Asphalt 2 (yep, it’s a racing game), other applications are Yahoo Go! and Instant Messaging: I just couldn’t configure this. The small app called Vtap Video is also here, this can display mobile content from a YouTube-like database, in case we are connected to the internet.
Multimedia
3.2 megpaixels, autofocus, flash… none of these have been previously characteristic of Motorola. Now we have it and it’s no disappointment. Neither the camera itself, nor the software, which has lots of settings. Although some are quite simplified (image size: small, medium, large), but the flash has a red-eye mode, we can turn off autofocus, there is image sequencing, self timer and preset modes. It’s worth taking pictures when the phone is closed, this is when the rear camera is working, when the handset is open we can see the image of the frontal camera and we have a high chance of being amazed by the view of our own head.
The images are surprisingly good. There is barely any noise; in turn the software noise filtering is a bit too hard, so some details are somewhat blurred here and there, but considering that the images are not larger than 500 KB there can really be no complaints about image quality. The phone is exceptionally good in macro mode. Videos can be recorded at QVGA resolution at a speed of 30 fps, while the test images can be seen below.
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There is nothing new in the musical part. Tracks can be filtered by artist and album; there are no problems with this. But it has been a problem already with Z8 that the software observes music files only if we copy them to a predefined directory of the phone or the memory card.
Z10 has medium quality in handsfree mode, it is surely better with a headset, but I couldn’t test this as Z10 arrived very “bare bone”. The software is quite simple, it can display album covers, runs in the background and there is nothing else to mention. There is of course stereo Bluetooth support, but no equalizer.
Data transfer, battery
Z10 can work even on HSDPA networks. Settings needed for the built-in web browser to work are downloaded automatically by the phone, so theoretically there can be no problems using it. Unfortunately the test phone had a different opinion, but it is known that the browser is the same, fine one that Z8 had. It has landscape view, navigation is rather easy. UIQ 3.3 (that has been already launched) will have the new Opera for displaying web content.
I have been angered a bit by the software called PC Sync, as I would have liked to do two things with it: transferring images and installing a screenshot program. There isn’t even a trace of the software download on the Hungarian Motorola site, so I tried the American one. I managed to get the 80+ MB software, I tried installing it three times, when it finally seemed that everything is okay, but then it complained about a .dll file, even though I had the latest Windows XP running on my PC. It even turned out that no matter the UIQ-compatibility, the screenshot program, which worked perfectly on all previous Sony Ericsson phones, has been rejected by Z10 with a security error. When looking around the web we can find Fring developed specifically for this platform so it’s a pity that there is no WLAN on Z10.
The battery, sitting under one part of the back cover, has a pretty poor performance. It didn’t take it even two days to go offline, at medium usage, but at least it can be charged from a PC via a USB cable – if we successfully install the PC Sync software.
Summary. Z10 is better than Z8. But it’s not good enough. The camera is evidently better, the software has less problems but I still had to reboot too much. The banana shape is rather spectacular, but it comes with its compromises and the UIQ system is really a curiosity without a touchscreen, but it couldn’t impress me again. System speed has been less than expected, so the thing is that I still can’t give any award to this model.
Bog
Translated by Szaszati
The handset has been provided by the manufacturer’s Hungarian representative. Thanks.
Specifications
| Motorola RIZR Z10 | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM, UMTS | |
| Size | 109.7 x 50.7 x 16.8 mm | |
| Weight | 115 grams | |
| Available colors | Silver | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2.2” | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 320 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 16M | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | dynamic | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | dynamic / 300KB | |
| Internal memory | 70 MB | |
| Memory expandability | microSDHC | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 850/900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / present | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | present (384 kbps) / present (3.6 Mbps) | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | none | |
| USB | 2.0 | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / none | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | present | |
| Vibra function | present | |
| Built-in handsfree | present | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | present / present | |
| Sound recorder | present | |
| Alarm clock | present, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | iTAP | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Symbian 9.2, UIQ 3.2 | |
| WAP / HTML browser | present / present | |
| E-mail client | present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated) | |
| Java | present, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | 1 | |
| Currency converter | present | |
| Extra software | Yahoo Go, Vtap Video | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 3.2 megapixels, autofocus, flash | |
| Secondary camera | present, VGA | |
| Video recording | present, QVGA, 30fps | |
| Music player | present, can run in background | |
| Equalizer | none | |
| FM radio | none | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 1030 mAh Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 400 hours | |
| Talk time | 300 minutes | |
| Other | ||
| banana shape | ||
