Reviews and tests / Motorola RIZR Z10, First impressions

SMAPE  Reviews and tests  Motorola  Motorola RIZR Z10, First impressions

The sales volume of the Motorola Company has been far from ideal lately, especially outside their native USA market. Back in 2007 this American giant yielded the second place on the world telecom market to the Korean Samsung brand, having a one-third drop in sales; and nowadays many people anticipate almost a forthcoming death of the RAZR and other bestsellers' creator. Not so long ago (on March, 7th) Stu Reed - the president of Motorola Mobile Devices - became a third top-manager retired lately; he had worked for the company for 8 months.

On the other hand, last year the American giant acquired from Sony Ericsson a 50 percent stake in UI Holdings BV, the owner of UIQ Technology AB and the respective software-platform. Such transactions are extremely rare when the company is on the verge of bankruptcy, that's why it's much too early to discount the originator of the legendary V3. In our opinion such forecasts are much exaggerated, the more so as Motorola have planned a number of interesting products for this year C the Texel and Skarven rank first among them.

The Skarven is a sequel to Z10 with a 240x400 pixel touchscreen; being a kick-slider as well yet with a 5 Mpix camera, it was codenamed of ZN1. As for the Texel it's a musical variation with the same screen, but implemented in the classical candy bar form-factor. The collaboration with Kodak also promises to be rather interesting and is going to be announced early in April. The first gadget to be released will become the X-Pixl, a thin candy bar codenamed ZN5. As we see, the plans are bright enough, but all this may be considered as an informal future so far and as for the present the company offer an already reviewed by us ROKR E8 (see Motorola MOTOROKR E8 Review) and an absolutely new RIZR Z10.

Announced one year ago in Barcelona the first RIZR based off the UIQ platform - the Z8 model became a remarkable event, since it was a slider, moreover a kick-slider having no touchscreen, etc - rather an unusual combination for the audience used to the Sony Ericsson production. The fame of Motorola - the second significant brand of the industry (for that moment) had done its part, while the concept in general looked very promising, making UIQ closer to S60 in the aspect of performance too thanks to the Instant On technology. The solution was positioned as a multimedia device supporting up to 32 Gb of storage and a great number of formats, including the latest RA. However the new product didn't become popular for a number of reasons, that's why Z10 was announced in the short run. It is going to hit the shelf by the end of May together with the ROKR E8.

Z10 is the closest counterpart of Z8 implemented in a different casing, utilizing a new camera as well as a little bit modified software; in particular the ShoZu mobile blogging application was added which is familiar to us by the Samsung gadgets. Let's begin with the key point - a camera - that is the main difference of the new product from its predecessor; the former sports a 3.2 Mpix autofocusing unit, while the latter possessed only 2 Mpix without autofocusing. It's a breakthrough for Motorola, since no model by this brand included such a solution before. A quite good LED flash is available and as for the quality of photos the model yields just a bit to Nokia N78 and Sony Ericsson W960i (especially to the latter). The application itself is stored in the nonvolatile memory, that's why it starts very quickly. Besides, the performance of the Z10 camera is remarkable for the capability of taking up to three full-size pictures per second.

As for video shooting, things are simpler here. Only QVGA is available, but at a framerate of 30 fps C it's not so impressive as with the top Nseries from Nokia and Viewty from LG, but still quite good against the background of Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

The appearance of the new RIZR makes an impression of a solid, quality product though it is implemented using no metal. The latter statement is true, however, save for a minor reservation - on the back panel there is a small insert a few centimeters wide (about 5-10% of the total area of the casing), framing the camera lens. The plastic of the other parts looks much like metal, one can even mistake one for another time and again C the stylization is just excellent. At the same time the quality of implementation is high; all the elements are tightly fitting each other, the covering is durable. It's to the advantage of the 'image charge'; Z10 really looks very impressive. Only one color variant is available, as well as with Z8. The latter, by the way, had a black soft-touch covering of all parts and a neon green lining, looking less expensive than the metallic finish of the new gadget.

The ergonomics of Z8 isn't among the strong points of the model and Z10 hasn't gone far from its predecessor in this aspect. Motorola themselves put the most accent on the handy design C they say a new form factor is meant to more comfortably fit the profile of your cheek due to the hinge in the central part. That won't provide a great advantage to you, but the handset poses certain discomfort since the keypad is too hard to press and the slider mechanism is not ideal. The lack of a touchscreen will also disappoint some people. It would stand to reason to have a lens guard that would launch the camera on opening C an increase in overall ergonomics of sorts, which is currently missing. As for the rest, everything is well done. Even the memory expansion slot is remarkable for hot swapping and the SIM-card is provided with a separate slot on the other side of the camera lens from the battery so you're not forced to pull out the battery to change the SIM card. Dimensions and weight are far from tiny, therefore the device is rather aimed at the gentlemen; it's too massive for the fair sex, a bit too thick in particular.

The Z10 hardware is based off the very same TI OMAP 2420 CPU operating at a frequency of 300 MHz that is utilized in Z8. The phone comes with 80 Mb of internal memory and a 512 Mb microSD card is included in the sales package. As for the connectivity, only Bluetooth is available; unfortunately the handset lacks Wi-Fi. 3G is supported; EDGE is also in its place. The screen is good, but not the brightest one and rather small for a PDA phone - 2.2". There is no FM-tuner; the battery displays average results in the lifetime tests. The multimedia aspect is better than that of the predecessor due to the said camera, though no dedicated player buttons are available, there is no separate audio output, etc. All this reduces the advantages of software implementation to a minimum.

The software platform is of the latest version - UIQ3.1 with a developed system of blogging, blacklisting functionality and so on C but for the ShoZu application, it's the same as what we saw in Z8. The handset is remarkable for its ability to operate with no SIM-card at all, which is critical for a cameraphone. The original UIQ from Sony Ericsson (since February, 2007) didn't feature such mode. By default the camera application activates the frontal VGA camera for video calls when the slider is open and the main one when it's closed, which is not always convenient. Mass Storage is supported; Z10 can be charged via USB cable, which is especially important, since the universal miniUSB slot is employed. The new gadget lacks any navigation features - GPS isn't so widespread with UIQ (unlike with S60) as one would like to, though Sony Ericsson themselves consider it to be one of the main trends of the current year. Therefore we can expect the situation to be resolved soon one way or another.

A more detailed review of RIZR Z10 will be available on our site in the closest future. Within the limits of this article let's dwell upon the marketing prospects of the model. It's maximally successive and sports quite ordinary specifications, that's why one shouldn't expect it to be much in demand. At the same time the solution is interesting as a fashion model offered at a rather affordable price. The price charged for the available features is quite reasonable for its class; one should just consider the pricing specificity of UIQ-smartphones and the present price for Z8 in view of all price corrections because of its unpopularity.

Comparison of Motorola RIZR Z10 to Nokia N78

For example, the closest Sony Ericsson G700 is priced 300 euros on the European market and Nokia N78 is going to be a bit cheaper than RIZR Z10. It's S60-based smartphones that will pose direct competition to the new gadget from America and in particular N82 with 5 Mpix, Wi-Fi, GPS, FM and other advantages, which is besides cheaper than Z10.

The device released by Motorola won't make a potential bestseller and even sport good sales, but in the UIQ segment the model is going to be in a certain demand for it has got no direct competitors on the market in general; it will appear in retail sooner than G700. A quality assortment offer with quite good marketing prospects (provided the initial price gets down to the stable level in a short period of time)

Author: Dmitry Ryabinin, dm@smape.com

SMAPE.com

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