Foreword, box contents
It is probably not the best thing to start a review’s text by repeating its title, but I just can’t do that, I have to: this is what we have been waiting for. At least I did, so I would quickly like to correct myself in order to prevent being told off for talking in other people’s names. So this is what I have been waiting for, as I’m holding a Motorola handset in my hands which doesn’t only look good, it’s not only high-quality and unique, but it’s fast and smart too and it doesn’t have any serious software lacks. Is there anyone who needs more?
The distributor has been MGSM this time, we have received the handset from them, thanks again! The gadget came in a rather small box, which seems to be made of recycled paper: that’s really positive. There are lots of small photos on the cover and there’s a label too: Shoot. Share. Show off.. So this is a camera phone, MotoZINE series, second member of it, as we only had ZN200 before. This might be the first case when a dumb-looking name has some meaning, as zine means the non-commercial publishing of articles or images in a low number of copies.
Another prominent thing is the Kodak logo on the front of the box. Hey, so this is the first Motorola which has the camera of the renowned manufacturer, that’s great. Probably all of you know the company, at least from the Kodachrome films, which only exist in ISO 64, 35 mm edition nowadays, as the company has lately moved to the digital market – and this includes mostly the low- and mid-range, unfortunately they didn’t launch a lens reflex camera for years now. The company, established in 1881, has its headquarters in Rochester and has a 10-year contract since 2006 with Motorola, so ZN5 doesn’t look like slap-dashed stuff. Before taking a look at the handset itself let’s return to the box: it looks great on the outside, it’s youthful but not as vain as the manufacturer’s devices are usually, the colors are manly. At least on the outside, as on the inside it’s pink, probably in order to scatter a grain of happiness for metrosexuals as well. Accessories: charger, data cable, a headset stolen from a ROKR and a TV-out cable.
External signs
Design has always been important at Motorola handsets and this is no different in the case of ZN5 either. It is a great thing, however, that this time it’s no one-of-a-dozen phone, fortunately it has nothing to do with V3, but it has some similarities with the recently launched E8 musical phone, as their keyboards look very much alike. The materials used are great, they are hard plastics that are nice to touch and don’t get dirty easily. Besides this the joints are very precise and the back is made of metal. This might be the reason for the 114 grams of weight, as the whole thing is not thick at all, its thickness is 16 mm at the camera and 12 in other parts, its height is 118 and width is 50.5 mm. So, I like the overall impressing, but I’m not alone with this opinion as my acquaintances have all told (except of one), regardless of their sex that they would accept the phone. The thing is that I have the same opinion, although I feel such a thing very rarely.
On top of the front cover there is the inevitable Motorola logo and we can see the phone’s speaker right near it. Below them there is the QVGA display with a diagonal of 2.4” and thanks to its high brightness level it can be read easily in sunshine too, and it’s high quality anyway. On the bottom there is the keypad, which, as I have already mentioned, resembles the one on E8, with the exception that here we physically have to press the keys to make them function. One might complain about the design over here, as the keypad looks a bit like a Christmas tree, it has so many colors. The center of the d-pad is pink (uh-oh), it has the red/green call handling keys near it, and the multimedia player that is colored in a different shade of pink. As a bonus we have the camera hotkeys hidden between the numeric keys. The keypad is not bad otherwise, even more one can type really easy on it, I only disliked the call handling keys, since they are too close to the softkeys.
The back is not extravagant either, but in spite of this it’s a great demonstration of the handset’s features. On top it’s four millimeters thicker than in other places, as here is the 5 megapixel Kodak camera, which is protected by a sliding cover. The mechanical system is great, even sliding is a great experience on its own. Below this, on the slimmer part, there is the Xenon flash and the handsfree speaker is in the bottom part.
On top we can only see the hook for attaching the wristband, just below this, on the left side of the handset, there is the standard 3.5 mm headset output – we again have to transmit our gratitude to the smart designers, however we have to add that Motorola is fortunately not one of those manufacturers who are forcing the least usable 2.5 mm connector. On the bottom there is the microUSB connector, protected by a rubber cover.
The bottom part is coated in rubber, there is an “engraved” Motorola label on it. In the bottom right there is the camera’s exposure key, its color is disgusting, I don’t understand why they had to do this. A bit upwards we can see the keylock slider with the volume control keys above it.
Hirdetés
Menu system, software
I’d like to start with one of the most important things: the heart of ZN5 is a 500 MHz Freescale processor. We’re not used to such a powerful chip in a “standard” mobile phone, and ZN5 is one of these, as although it’s based on Linux, it’s open source and we cannot only install Java applications on it. The menu system is similar to the one on E8, but it’s much, much faster. Animations are fast, screen changes don’t lag, and applications start up quickly, so the handset is completely okay from this point of view.
You can see the standby screen on the three pictures above, it’s no use writing too much about it. The main menu has nine icons, we can browse them horizontally. The first menu item is the alarm clock for some reason, which is surely useful, but I still don’t understand why did they put it at the first place. In the back we can see the Kodak GalleryLink and Google, which are web links and we also have an office tools thingy, which will be used lots of times, as the call log can be found over here.
The calendar is very easy to use, it has day/week/month views, there is a world clock, a notepad, a voice recorder and a calculator with basic functions. For some reason there is no stopwatch and unit converter on the phone, although there would be a couple of people who would use such applications. There are five games on the phone, four of these had Chinese names and I had no courage to launch them.
Phone calls and stuff
Let’s start with the sad part: ZN5 is not a 3G handset. This would probably be the place for some kind of crying emoticon, let’s admit: it’s quite a big flaw that the flagship phone supports only second generation networks. It is possible that marketing is the reason for this and we will soon get a ZN6, which will support this too, but on one hand I do not know of such a thing and on the other hand… so, hey, 3G is required. This flaw is partially corrected with a WiFi receiver, which supports 802.11i as well as the usual 802.11b/g, so it’s unique from this point of view. We will browse the web mostly with this, as we can only use GPRS and EDGE for data transfer. The GSM module is quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), there is Bluetooth 2.0 that supports the stereo profile (A2DP).
I had no problems during phone calls, sound quality and volume were both okay, although I think voices were a bit deeper than usual, but there is practically no problem with that. We can store 2000 contacts in the phonebook, there are lots of extra fields, we can attach images and ringtones too. The call log is also all right, we can view received/missed/dialed calls separately or on a single list and even more, not only the last 10-20 calls are stored – I’m currently at 81, I don’t know where the limit is.
There is nothing to complain about messaging either. There is MMS support and an e-mail client too, which supports authenticated IMAP servers. The size of internal memory is 350 MB, which can be expanded with a microSD card – the slot is unfortunately not SDHC-compatible, so we can’t use extreme sized cards. The slot is behind the battery, but since the handset can function as a USB Mass Storage device (like a card reader), this is not such a big issue – even more since thanks to the 2.0 data connector it’s quite fast.
Multimedia
So the camera is a Kodak one with a resolution of 5 megapixels and autofocus. There is a Xenon flash to help it work in poor lighting conditions and it’s a great help indeed. After sliding the cover we have to wait about three seconds in order to take the first picture, which is not the fastest thing, but the image on the viewfinder compensates for everything, as it’s extremely fast. But really, even a mid-range compact camera could be envious of this speed, the live picture on-screen is fluent, doesn’t lag and it works in the same perfect way even if there isn’t much light. The software, however, is no big deal, at least it doesn’t have as many features as it would be “right and proper” for such a great image sensor: we can’t set sensitivity or light metering, there is just the basic stuff like white balance and exposure correction.
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Image quality is great, but no matter Kodak or not, ZN5 is by far not the best camera phone, it’s just much weaker than Samsung i8510. There is basically one problem with the pictures: noise level is quite high. Otherwise they would be okay, edge sharpness is great, colors are nice, rim obscuration level is minimal, there is no chromatic aberration, but noise is still more than it should. The highest available resolution for images is 2560 x 1920 pixels, while videos can be recorded at 176 x 144 pixels, I don’t even know if this is the shocking or the funny category. We might have again marketing as the reason, since the video phone is Z10, so we should be using ZN5 for photography only. I am absolutely sure that the sensor would be capable of recording QVGA videos at 30 frames/second.
The music player application is not bad, although it’s a bit slower than the handset itself. It can filter tracks by artist, album, genre and style, it can display album covers, although these are so small thumbnails that they cannot be really seen even with a magnifier. There is an equalizer with nine presets, we can’t create our owns. We can seek, seeking speed increases dynamically, but it’s a great problem that volume can be set in only seven steps. The program can run in the background, in this case it gets nicely built in the standby screen where we can access all important features. There is an FM radio, it works nicely. The handsfree speaker is medium quality while the headset is quite good and rather comfortable.
Battery, summary
The battery has a capacity of 950 mAh. Standby time, according to manufacturer specs, is shockingly high: 580 hours. Of course this is not the real value, the phone was online for about three days with one charge, average use, but this didn’t include any music playback. Music fans will probably have to charge the phone every second day, but it might happen that a daily charge will be required.
Summary: Motorola ZN5 is not a perfect device, that’s sure. I still say that this is the handset that we’ve been waiting for, for a long time. At last we have a Motorola that doesn’t only look good, but it’s also fast and it’s even finely assembled. It has some flaws, the most serious being the lack of 3G, although this is partially “cured” by the WiFi support. I still don’t understand why is there no stopwatch and currency converter on the phone, but to tell the truth the 5 megapixel camera is more than enough of a compensation. This was the first handset from the manufacturer that I have really liked to use, it has been a good feeling to take it into my hand, it has been good to keep playing around with it, and I didn’t see any serious flaws even in spite of the ones I have enlisted, as I don’t use 3G. The end user price of the handset is currently about €270 EUR. It is surely recommended for this price and it would be highly recommended if it would have 3G.
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| Motorola ZN5 |
Bocha
Translated by Szaszati
Motorola ZN5 has been provided by MGSM. The handset can be purchased at:
1024 Budapest, Lövőház u. 12.
On-line at www.mgsm.hu.
Specifications
| Motorola ZN5 | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM | |
| Size | 118 x 50.5 x 12-16 mm | |
| Weight | 114 grams | |
| Available colors | Gray | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2.4” | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 320 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 262.000 | |
| Memory | ||
| Internal memory size | 350 MB | |
| Phonebook capacity | 2000 entries | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | n.a. / 300 KB | |
| Memory expandability | microSD | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 850/900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 12 / Class 12 | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | none / none | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | present (802.11b/g/i) | |
| USB | 2.0 (microUSB) | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / none | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | none | |
| Vibra function | present | |
| Built-in handsfree | present | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | none / none | |
| Sound recorder | present | |
| Alarm clock | present, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | iTAP | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Linux-based Motorola | |
| WAP / HTML browser | 2.0 / present | |
| E-mail client | present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated) | |
| Java | present, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | 5 | |
| Currency converter | none | |
| Extra software | SongID | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 5 megapixels, autofocus, Xenon flash | |
| Secondary camera | none | |
| Video recording | present (176 x 144 pixels) | |
| Music player | present, can run in background | |
| Equalizer | present, presets only | |
| FM radio | present | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 950 mAh Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 580 hours | |
| Talk time | 9 hours 30 minutes | |
| Other | ||
| 500 MHz Freescale CPU, TV-out, 3.5 mm jack output | ||
