Motorola ZN5 cameraphone: breakthrough combination
The Motorola Motozine ZN5 is a totally new animal. It is part cell phone and part digital camera but with the emphasis on digital camera. It is the result of co-operation between Motorola and Kodak. Most mobile phones have the camera as an afterthought. Not this one.
This machine — let us think of a good name for it late for Motozine lacks style — has a 5-megapixel camera complete with nearly all the gubbins. And it is relatively inexpensive.
It’s main problem is that it does not have 3G support in the phone, which is a pretty daft decision.
This Motorola looks like a typical mobile phone but a bit fatter, a bit larger. It has a bright, 2.4-inch, 320-by-240-pixel screen, and beneath that lies a flat keypad. The handset also has dedicated keys for different camera functions, such as photo reviewing and sharing.
Turn it one way and it looks like a stand-alone point-and-shoot camera, complete with a Xenon flash and lens cover. (This last has been mentioned by several reviewers as being less than a total success in the it can fall off. Show me a lens cover that does not do that.)
The results from the camera are pretty stunning.
David Pogue is the technical editor of the New York Times and is excellent at his job. He has reviewed the camera by going out and taking pictures and they are totally stunning. You can see them at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/technology/personaltech/04pogue.html.
On the camera you have autozoom, a low-light setting, three focus settings (auto, landscape, and macro), five white-balance settings, panoramic and multishot modes (a brilliant example of a panorama in the Pogue article), an autotimer, and six shutter sounds.
OK, it is not possible to manually adjust the shutter speed or set the aperture. The click-to-capture speed is about 0.02 seconds. And, OK, that is not the fastest in the world but it is as quick as a lot of cameras, and in a mobile phone it is unique.
The camera automatically adjusts aperture and shutter speed depending on the environmental lighting. In that role you can think of it as a snapshot camera.
But it is more than that because amazingly Motorola has built-in a facility where you can edit your photos: re-size, rotate, crop, brighten, increase contrast and add sharpness. You can even add borders.
Attach it to your PC with the included USB cable or 1GB microSD card, or, and I love this feature, by way of text message.
All reviews agree the photo quality is the best ever seen from a mobile phone. (You can actually take videos as well but that is probably a bridge too far.)
The ZN5 supports Wi-Fi but does not, in this new version of the United States, have 3G which would be madness in most markets.
And I should mention, although it does not seriously interest me, it will also play MP3 music and tune into an FM radio station.
The question do I want one, would I use one? If the price is, as suggested, around the $100 mark depending on the contract, I would be at it like a mad dog. I find it much more attractive than the iPhone. But, then, I like taking pictures.
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