Plemix

The Motorola MOTOZINE ZN5 is perhaps the first serious attempt by Motorola to produce a “camera phone”. The spec looks pretty good on paper: Wi-Fi, 5MP with auto-focus, 12mm thick (16mm at bump) and a friendly price tag. Does it live up to the expectation?

I can’t wait to find out now! The package is still quite “Motorola” with a lot of stuff inside. Inside it there are the phone, battery, charger, AV cable, USB cable, stereo handsfree and a user’s guide with CD-rom. The design on the box looks pretty nice, too.

The design is not very exceptional, certainly not as bold and revolutionary as the Motorola MOTO U9 but it still looks pretty nice with all the flashy buttons.

One thing to praise is the color scheme and icon design on the phone. ModeShift icons are distinguished by the purple color while the answer/reject buttons get the distinctive green and red colors.

Motorola had been using the key pad for soooooooo long! This key pad design was there since the launch of the legendary Motorola MOTORAZR V3 and there were some modified versions of this design on the MOTOKRZR and the new MOTORAZR lines of phones. I need not repeat how good these keys feel but I sincerely hope some day Motorola will come up with something new but equally functional.

Motorola is quite serious this time. It managed to have Kodak’s support in building the camera part. Motorola claims that the Kodak Imaging Technology and Kodak PERFECT TOUCH Technology can produce excellent images. You can judge whether the claim holds true by looking at the pictures below.

Here’s the “bump” that gave the phone an extra 4mm thickness. The lens has a lens cover and sliding it out trigger the camera mode and light up those ModeShift buttons which are responsible for controlling the camera instantly. The lens cover is significantly smaller than those found on Sony Ericsson’s camera phones.

You can upload photos via Wi-Fi to the Kodak Gallery. I don’t use any online album (didn’t even heard of Kodak Gallery before) so I am yet to check out the usefulness of this function. Motorola should have added support for Facebook and other more popular websites.

Motorola is quite proud of the phone’s response. Navigation is fluid and the menus are organized nicely.

Here’s the camera mode with ModeShift icons lit up (the small purple one on the far right).

You can browse your masterpieces horizontally on the 2.4” screen, which is pretty big for a phone at this price.

The photos are pretty sharp, notice the texture on the orange area.

Here’s a shot taken with the low-light setting, which pushes the Xenon flash to the maximum power. As you can see from the picture below, which was taken with the phone being held very close to the toys, the flash is not the “blindingly bright” kind but it should be adequate for filming in a small dark room.

In the panorama mode there are 3 red boxes to help you see the alignment of the shots, if your hand is too shaky you can immediately notice it since the images in the 3 red boxes won’t align well. After some serious computations the phone gives you an image that is very well stitched with no visible artifacts. Here’s an example.

The phone lives up to the expectation as a camera phone with extremely good photo quality. Wi-Fi is nice to have but I’d rather substitute it with a 3.5G HSDPA modem. The phone has a nice, speedy response and the relatively conservative design is excellent (I was never a big fan of Motorola’s bold designs). The price tag is quite friendly for a camera phone, too.