Motorola ZN5

The ZN5 is the product of a joint effort from Motorola and Kodak to create a 5MP camera phone that aims to provide users with exceptional photos – or so they claim. Here’s what I have to say after testing the ZN5 and putting it though its paces.

Form Factor
This candybar handset is a little weighed down at the top end where the camera is located. The 2.4-inch TFT LCD has a standard 240 x 320 pixel resolution with 256K colors. The touch-sensitive keypad can be a bit of a pain though – it’s not really touch-sensitive since it requires you to depress the keys, just as you would with a normal keypad. One problem is you’re likely to end up typing more letters than you need, because of the extra sensitivity.

The shiny little studs on the numbers give it a bit of a girly feel. There are three shortcut keys when the camera is active: for deleting images, accessing the gallery, and for file transfer. The keys around the five-way nav-pad are a little too close together for comfort.

On one side of the handset are the volume/zoom keys, a small slider to lock the keypad, and a dedicated camera key. A 3.5mm earphone socket and well-concealed USB port are located on the other side. There’s no hot-swap slot for the microSD card. Even if it comes with 350MB of internal user memory and a 2GB card, not having a hot-swap is a real downer.

The 5MP camera has a slide-down lens cover to keep the lens protected. Moving the lens cover down automatically activates the camera. The Xenon flash is located right beside it.