Motorola ZN5: Have Motorola blown their
last chance?
23rd
June 2008 NEW!
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Way back in January 2006, Motorola and
Kodak announced
that they were going to collaborate in an "alliance
intended to fulfill the promise of mobile imaging for
the benefit of consumers". Two and a half years
later, Motorola and Kodak have announced the MOTOZINE
ZN5 which possibly has the most advanced stills
camera in any phone around.
Kodak have certainly pulled their weight
with the ZN5, but have Motorola? Moto's contribution
to the ZN5 is a GSM phone with WiFi, a pretty standard
2.4" display, no GPS and no 3G.
What were Motorola thinking? Clearly
the Nokia
N95 and N95
8GB are the phones to compete with, and the N95
was announced almost two years ago. Almost all 5 megapixel
camera phones have 3G, and most new ones have GPS as
that allows geotagging as well as satellite navigation.
It's not as if Motorola can't make decent
phones - put the Kodak 5 megapixel camera in a
platform like the Z10
or a UMTS version of the A1800
and you would have a handset that's hard to beat. Motorola
can clearly do 3.5G, GPS and now decent cameras, so
why not put everything in one handset?
In essence, the Motorola MOTOZINE ZN5
looks like two devices crudely stuck together -
a decent digital camera and a pretty dull GSM phone.
Yes, the camera can use the WiFi to upload images and
it can also utilize the built-in Bluetooth to print,
but this could all have been so much better.
So, why the big deal over the ZN5? Well,
Motorola have been leaking sneak previews of the camera
plus sample photos taken with the phone for some time
now. It's clear that the MOTOZINE ZN5 is a big deal
for Moto, and yet the handset just fails to deliver..
just at the point that they need it most. Even though
Motorola is trying to recover from its RAZR
addiction, it still can't seem to get things right.
We don't know if Motorola have anything
else big lined up for 2008. We doubt it. And the sad
fact is this: if the ZN5 is really the best they can
come up with, then Motorola's mobile phone business
is surely doomed..
..and that would be a shame because
we know that the folks at Moto can do some
great things. So perhaps.. just perhaps.. there
is something waiting in the wings that really will show
what Motorola can do if it tries.
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