Make: Motorola
Model: MotoZINE ZN5
Carrier: T-Mobile
Owned from 7/2009 - 7/2011
In July 2009, the phone I had carried for the entire duration of high school and part of college had finally kicked the bucket, and it was time for a new phone. After doing some research, this is the phone that finally caught me in a two-year contract.
Introduction
---------------------------
This phone is an odd old relic of a transitional time; a time before the smartphone had fully asserted dominance in the market for premium phones. Rather than touting processor speed and RAM capabilities, this phone was developed in conjugation with the well-known Kodak corporation to create the camera phone to rule all camera phones.
Camera
------------------------------
Since this was the selling point of the camera, this seems like a logical place to start. This phone is essentially a low-end Kodak point-and-shoot camera sans-zoom and with a phone slapped onto it.
Major features of note are:
- 5MP Kodak sensor
- Xenon flash
- Auto-focus (normal/macro)
- 2x/4x digital zoom
- Integrated basic photo editing
Simply put, this is the best phone camera I have ever owned, which is saying a lot since my new HTC MyTouch has a whopping 8MP camera. Photos are crisp and noise free, except when using low-light (high ISO). The xenon flash can tend to over-expose subjects photographed in low light settings, but it is infinitely more useful than the standard LED flash found in most cameras even today. The camera program loads quickly when the lens cover is opened, and shutter lag is minimal, which is surprising considering the phone's tendency to freeze(we'll get into that later.) My only real complaint is the difficulty it has with photographing direct light sources. The protective glass over the lens has some sort of anti-glare coating, which works fairly well. But when photographing a light source (sun or street lamp), the light from that source will bounce back and forth between the lens and the protective covering, causing a number of red "ghost" images to show up in the image. They can be removed with photoshop, but are nonetheless a nuisance. Below are some sample images taken with the phone (all taken by me):
Calls and Text
-----------------------------------
Although the camera was the main selling point of the phone, let's not forget that it is still a phone and your only way to communicate with the outside world. So how well does it keep you in the loop?
Calls are acceptable, but not outstanding. It can sometimes be difficult for both parties to hear the call, especially when in areas with spotty reception. Out of the box, it comes with the MotoROKR hands-free set, which offer amazing sound quality and a really, really crappy microphone. So, don't try using those for anything except music. The phone works well enough when held up to your ear, but keep in mind that this phone puts out just about the maximum legally acceptible amount of radiation.
Texting is doable, but only minimally so. The phone was designed without physically separated buttons, so if you are a touch-texter, you only have a series of bumps to navigate by. The bump is very slightly larger on the number 5, which makes it possible to text without looking at the keypad, but this is not a recommended phone for a novice texter (which I was at the time). To further complicate things, the bump on the number 0 broke off after I had the phone for about a year and a half, and the bump on the number 1 broke off about three months later. If that wasn't enough, the phone is notorious for random freeze-ups as it frequently runs out of RAM and has to halt all graphics processing while the CPU catches up. So, expect the phone to freeze for up to 20-30 seconds before catching up to what you were typing. The phone does this when performing other tasks, but expect it to happen most often when composing a message.
Hardware, Software, and GUI
-------------------------------------------This phone is simple enough. It sports the standard keypad buttons, two context-sensitive menu buttons, and a directional pad with a central enter button. The phone is locked and unlocked via a switch on the side. It is relatively heavy and very thin, but it has a very good feel if you can hunt down the rubber skin made for the phone. The camera button is located on the side, allowing it to function just like a digital camera when in camera mode. Pushing the camera button or opening the lens cover will cause the camera to go directly into camera mode, although it will yell at you if you attempt to go into camera mode with the lens cover still closed.
Memory is not lacking on the phone, for what it's worth. It can hold as many contacts as you are likely to actually know in real life, and it will generally max out after roughly 3,000 messages. If you are like me and like to hang on to the cute messages that special someone sends you, I would highly recommend organizing them, since the inbox has a tendency to freeze if you store more than a few hundred messages in it. The phone comes with about 350 MB of internal storage, and can support up to a 4GB memory card. This is enough to store a couple thousand photos, so you won't have to worry about constantly deleting the contents of your phone. The phone also has a built-in MP3/M4A player that can put out some high-quality audio, so I would recommend putting those otherwise useless ROKR headphones to good use.
Out of the box, the phone has built in Wi-Fi and 3G capabilities, but without a touch screen, I can't say I'd recommend trying to browse the web on this thing. It doesn't have anything except a couple demos loaded onto it, but there are a number of games and other programs that can be loaded onto the phone, either via USB or BlueTooth. A friend of mine gave me a homebrew Zelda game he downloaded online, but it inexplicably disappeared from my memory card six months later. So just remember to regularly back all your programs and files on a regular basis.
TL;DR
----------------------
Bottom line is, this phone was sold as a stand-in for your favorite digital camera, and that is just about all it's good for. It is laggy, buggy and frustrating, but it takes gorgeous pictures.
No comments:
Post a Comment