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Reviewer: Shveta - India
Date: 28th Apr 2010

Initially I liked the phone. But now, I just want to throw it away. I cannot connect to Internet, because PC suite is not available for this phone. This is very very slow, even slower than one can imagine. Voice is very unclear when you talk over the phone. I hate this phone.

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Reviewer: Rishiguru - India
Date: 4th Apr 2010

Exceptional mobile phone. Actually I consider it to be the Motorola's MASTERPIECE.

Motorola is known to manufacture mobile phones with rock solid build quality using top notch & expensive materials like steel, aluminium, mineral glass rather than glossy plastic commonly used by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG. This always has been Motorola's strong point. The ZN5 is no exception either, it is almost built in metal & has a thick scratch resistant mineral glass over the TFT display matrix which is excellent.

The assembly quality is truly exceptional. All the parts sit tight, there's no slightest play between the details. The handset feels like a monolith. The casing frame & the side edges are painted silver. The surface coating sports a very high quality. The back panel uses metal as well, though the lower part is rubber, which is very practical, the scratches & worn spots are kept away.

The Motorola ZN5 measure 12mm in thickness, which is a rather nice achievement, it actually puts it in Top 5 of slimmest 5 MP camera phones. The body thickness however increases around the camera area to up to 16mm.

The display in ZN5 is way ahead of the European contenders like Nokia & Sony Ericsson. Actually mobile phones which are manufactured in Japan by Japanese companies have exceptional displays & generally are way better than the European counterparts. Just think about top LCD screen manufactures of the world, Sharp, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC, etc all reside in Japan. Whereas European mobile phone manufactures use TFT displays manufactured by local European companies, Motorola uses TFT display manufactured by Sharp Corporation of Japan. The display has class leading brightness & contrast levels, the colours are maximally natural & saturated. Undeniably, the best 2.4 inch QVGA display to adorn a mobile phone so far.

The morphing key pad, called ModeShift & first introduced in Motorola E8, is also present in ZN5. It's got haptic feedback on every key press & key designations & backlight change in accordance to the currently used application & makes life a lot easier instead of running through menus & submenus of the current running application.

The phone is all about the camera & it does not disappoint on this ground. Believe me, it is the BEST 5 MP CAMERA PHONE with the most advanced 5 MP CMOS camera module currently available on the market today, make no mistake about it. It uses Carl Zeiss optics & has mechanical shutter like Nokia N82. The Kodak's participation has brought the Kodak Perfect Touch technology to the ZN5 which can make any picture taken look sharper & brighter.

Motorola ZN5 is also the industry first to introduce VARIABLE APERTURE technology in the camera unit of a mobile phone. In layman's terms, theory says the variable aperture allows the camera to choose either the benefit of better than standard light sensitivity or better-than-standard sharpness throughout the photo. The ZN5 camera will offer two apertures values. Technically the photos at smaller apertures (indicated by a larger F stop value) should be sharper & with larger depth of field than photos shot by any other 5 MP camera phones on the market. The camera will automatically pick between F2.8 (the standard for all camera phones) & F5.6 (when there is enough light). Now that may not mean much to you, but a tighter aperture such as F5.6 will actually bring less lens issues & better corner to corner sharpness.

ZN5 has the most powerful xenon flash found on any mobile phone. It can take pictures at pitch dark with ease because of xenon flash & produce bright pictures. The ZN5 also offers direct image upload to KODAK Gallery, as well as integration of the ShoZu client, which can upload images to various social networking clients.

The hardware found in ZN5 almost represents the hardware of a stealth fighter plane I.e. Built to kill its opposition. Running on a Freescale MXC275-30 platform having 532 MHz ARM11 applications processor & 208MHz Digital Signal Processor (DSP) speaks for itself. It has 64 MB RAM & 128 MB ROM. Also it has two Image Processing Units (IPU) instead of one, one is the Freescale IPU that comes with the MXC275-30 platform capable of handling up to 2 MP images & the other is Texas Instruments dedicated DM299 IPU which has an ARM7 processor embedded in it capable of handling up to 5 MP images. Thus ZN5 thus have hardware capable of handling 5+2=7 MP images & thus can handle image & video much better than any of its 5 MP opposition. Internal memory is 512 MB which is huge, no opposition can match that & also you can extend it up to 4GB with a microSD card.

Audio sound quality from the music player is awesome. Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP), 3.5mm audio/video jack (TV-out) all adds to the list making it a perfect choice instead of a dedicated portable music player. After using Nokia N82, Sony Ericsson K850 & also Samsung, LG phones of the same price range, I have to accept that ZN5 is the best of them all when it comes to PURE SOUND QUALITY.

It's not much of a secret that every music phone manufacturer does everything to outreach its competitors in the sound quality. Now, one has to know the difference between sound quality & volume. The ICE power audio chips commonly found in Samsung mobile phones boosts sound volume which has no effect on the quality making them one of the loudest in the market. Both Motorola & Nokia tends to put more emphasis in the idea that quality should prevail over volume. The utilization of dedicated DSPs in Nokia & Motorola offers an unmatched quality of sound since DSP puts into action sophisticated algorithms & advanced audio codec's to improve the audio signal rather than making the sound louder. The DSP separates unwanted noise from the audio signal, & only then is passed to the amplifier.

ZN5 utilizes a dedicated 208 MHZ StarCore SC140e DSP & a selection of advanced audio codec's. The Spatial Audio technology polishes the resulting audio signal to a state of perfection rarely seen on a mobile phone these days. I also looked in the RMAA sound test graphs as published by different websites, the sound characteristic needs no explanation, because we face one of the best decisions at the personal audio market, ZN5 is not ashamed to compare itself with players from Creative ZEN, Sony, Cowon or even Apple iPod.

I am dealing with one of the best solutions for pure listening pleasure, with a clean sound devoid of any colourings, embellishment or ornamentation in the sound, commonly found in Sony Ericsson phones. Now I can easily hear many of the previously obscure details in the compositions of a complicated music composition, & if desired, with a quality headset, can clearly set apart all the instruments used in the music composition, thus I am able to focus not only on the primary instrument, which is audible, but also on the fact that what instrument I want to hear.

Setting the radio stations on the inbuilt radio is a lengthy process, but I don't mind simply because the radio have amazingly strong reception quality & the sound is loud, crisp & crystal clear making it the best radio I have seen so far on any mobile phone.

This mobile phone is capable of playing videos of very high bitrates (Higher bitrates means better quality) due to its 2 IPU's & 208 Mhz DSP. Bitrates as high as 240x320@25fps, 1100 kbps can be played easily.

Besides functionality, the quality of assembly & materials is the lodestone around which a phone's success is built, playing a decisive role in the customer's choice. Better materials & assembly allow a handset to live longer & sustain more damage.

I cannot stop praising the phone isn't it! One has to remember ZN5 is a Smartphone since it comes with an MOTOMAGX LJ 6.3 operating system (Linux) & not just plain Java software. So third party software's & modding options are limitless. Also Motorola's renowned Crystal Talk technology is also present which suppresses unwanted background noise while talking with the phone.

Lastly, I want to say even if it sounds demoralizing, that there is no phone in the world that happens to be absolutely perfect. Every phone has its pros & cons & it depends on the user needs that how the person will rate his or her phone.

Cons of ZN5 .

- ZN5 does not support 3G, but have EDGE & Wi-Fi to complement it. So if you are using 3G a lot avoid buying this phone.

- Video recording is poor. Nokia N82 wins over ZN5 on this aspect hands down. If you want the best 5Mpix mobile phone to shoot still images buy ZN5, but if you want to record videos over still images buy N82.

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Reviewer: Dave - Chesterfield, UK
Date: 18th Jan 2009

I have had my ZN5 for a couple of weeks now, so thought I would leave my opinion for anybody thinking of getting one. Being a long time Motorola user I had high hopes for this phone after trying one of the terrible Z10'S. So I've split my opinions into the three categories as above.

DESIGN. I am not a big fan of candy bar style phones, but with no decent flips out there to compete with the V8, I decided to go for one, its neither a beautiful phone or an ugly one, the flat keyboard does help its looks, & it looks better in the flesh than it does in pictures, all in all I like it, it grows on you.

FEATURES. Most complaints have been about the lack of 3G on this phone, but this is something I never use, I never video call, & if I want to download onto my phone, I use my computer & then transfer it to my phone. The phone comes with everything else you would expect, its main feature being its excellent camera, it really does take brilliant pictures, & it's so fast, once the lens cover is flipped open, it really does operate more like a camera than a phone, all in all I am very pleased.

USABILITY. Good news for Motorola fans is that the menus are very similar to the RAZR & other Motorola's, & easy to navigate, the keypad is easy to use for texting, & the phone retains Motorola's excellent pre emptive text, I have not suffered any software problems as of yet, & find the phone to be reasonably quick.

If you're looking for a decent camera phone, I would highly recommend the ZN5, I am more than pleased with mine, & look forward to future releases from Motorola in the Zine series.

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Reviewer: Saf - UK
Date: 4th Dec 2008

I bought phone about a week ago, after doing a few tests & checking I found that all in all, this is an excellent phone.

The camera is really good for what is a 5.0 megapixel camera, I done tests with my brothers N95 8GB, & the Motorola shined through.

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Reviewer: Fred - Beijing, China
Date: 28th Sep 2008

Great camera, shame about the rest of the phone. Far too slow, I spend my time just having to wait around for it to catch up with me. The software is buggy, & stuff takes forever to load.

Memory is also a big issue. If I run multimedia finder & music library at the same time, which practically are used together, up pops a screen saying aaarrrgh, I am out of memory. All I wanted was something which I could use hands-free with a 3.5mm jack with a good camera, all at the same time without difficulty. It's the without difficulty which this phone finds hard.

Great camera though, well, it would be if I could set default settings to not just be on auto all the time. Just somewhat disappointed, that's all. Speed mostly.



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