First off, no 3G. The phone is limited to quad-band GSM/EDGE. It does add Wi-Fi, though, for sharing pictures through hotspots. While the Wi-Fi is nice, 3G is a necessity for a phone with a camera of this caliber. You won’t be able to send large image files without finding Wi-Fi. Motorola did not say if the ZN5 can use the Wi-Fi radio for browsing the Internet, but it is probable that it can.
Camera
The camera itself is 5 megapixels. It has a full flash, which results in much better pictures taken in low-light settings. On top of that, the camera has been optimized for taking pictures in low-light settings to begin with. Kodak said that 70% of all pictures are taken indoors, so it made sure to include this low-light sensitivity. Pressing the shutter button halfway will focus the image in less than 1 second. Compared to many other camera phones that have auto-focus, this is pretty fast. You can, however, override the auto-focus and just press down all the way on the shutter button to capture an image faster. What this does is set aside the auto-focus and sets the camera to a standard 6 feet to infinity focus mode.
Hardware
The phone is very similar in shape and feel to the MOTOROKR E8. Nearly identical in footprint, what sets the ZN5 apart the most is the lack of the semi-circular navigation scroll bar and the quality of the keypad. The scroll bar has been replaced with a standard 5-way D-pad. This D-pad feels OK. It is a little on the small side for my tastes. All the buttons that run along the outer edge of the phone work well and feel good, though the camera button itself felt a little loose to us. We’ll chock this up to it being a prototype model.
The keypad is the phone’s only real failing. It loses the E8′s fantastic haptic feedback keypad and replaces it with a keypad that is similar to the recently released Motorola Z9. It feels cheap and plastic-y. The buttons all felt “clacky”. While travel and feedback was good, we couldn’t help but be underwhelmed by how cheap it felt. This could be because the unit is pre-production, but knowing what the keypad quality is of other Motorola handsets, we’re not hopeful that it will be improved on production units.
The phone does have a 3.5mm headset jack, which is nice, as well as an exterior slot for the microSD card. In all, it is slim, pocketable, and feels decent.
For Motorola, this is a much needed product in its lineup of devices.
