Motozine ZN5 Makes Pictures Equal to Calls

Source: motorola.com Motozine ZN5

All right already — enough with the iPhone wannabes!

Sprint Instinct, BlackBerry Storm, T-Mobile G1, LG Dare, HTC Diamond, Sony Xperia X1, Motorola Krave, Samsung just-about-everything. Black body, silver bezel, black touch screen. We get it. Can we move on now?

What about regular, nontouch-screen cellphones — the ones preferred by the huge majority? Doesn’t anyone care about them anymore?

Fortunately, yes. the new Motorola/Kodak Motozine ZN5 ($100 after rebate, with two-year T-Mobile contract) deserves a lot more attention than it’s getting.

So what it is? A phone camera.

That’s not the same thing as a camera phone. Everybody’s got a camera phone. A camera phone is a cellphone with a bare-bones, blurry, feeble approximation of a camera tacked on. No zoom, no flash, no lens cover, no manual controls, no burst mode, no TV cable, no U.S.B. jack for transferring pictures to your computer.

In short, a typical camera phone is a real digital camera in the same way that a go-kart is a Lexus.

But why should we settle for this? Why can’t a cellphone be a real digital camera?

Now it can. The ZN5 is more of a proper digital camera than almost any phone before it.

The cleverest part is the design. When the sliding lens cover is closed, it’s a phone. It has a crisp 2.4-inch screen, the usual Send and End keys, and a brightly lighted number keypad. (The keys offer a satisfying clickiness, and tiny raised dots help you find your way; however, they are otherwise completely flat and require you to look at them to dial.)

In fact, as a cellphone, the ZN5 is fairly loaded. It offers voice dialing, either by name (“Call Chris office”) or number (“dial 556-1234”). It does instant messaging using AIM, ICQ, Yahoo or Windows Live Messenger. It gets onto the Web as smoothly as is possible on a screen this small. Its e-mail program comes with presets for Yahoo Mail, AOL, Gmail, Mobile Me, Comcast, EarthLink and others.

You can listen to its music player either through the standard headphone jack or wirelessly, using Bluetooth headphones. You can even enjoy FM radio, as long as the earbuds are plugged in (they double as the antenna).

Best of all, there’s Wi-Fi. Whenever you’re in an Internet hot spot, you can briskly check e-mail, surf the Web and — most important of all — upload your photos (more on this in a moment).

In short, when you look at the back, where the dialing keys are, you see only a cellphone.

But when you look at the front, you see only camera. Here’s the lens cover, the xenon flash, even an autofocus assist lamp, which briefly illuminates your subject enough for sharp focusing in low light.

To take a photo, you turn the ZN5 horizontal, like a camera, and slide open the lens cover. Suddenly, the screen becomes a bright, smooth viewfinder. You can press the four points of the control dial to summon controls like Flash (On, Off, Redeye or Automatic); Low Light mode (On, Off); Focus (Landscape, Macro, Automatic); and White Balance (Tungsten, Fluorescent, Daylight, Cloudy, Automatic).

The shutter button is exactly where you’d expect to find it: top right edge. You can depress it halfway to prefocus, just as on a camera, and then press fully to capture the image. Unlike most cellphones, this one has a real, mechanical autofocus and shutter.

Shot-to-shot time is fast—about one second. Photos are stored either in the camera’s 350 megabytes of internal memory, or onto a MicroSD card; a 1-gigabyte card is included.

When you’re using the ZN5 as a camera, the number keys go dark —and new buttons magically appear, illuminated in blue. (Now you know why the keypad is completely flat.) These camera buttons come and go as necessary. For example, when you’re taking pictures, a Play button lights up, so that you can review your photos. And when you’re in playback mode, buttons for Delete and Share appear.

The coolest feature is the fully automatic Panorama mode, in which the camera takes three side-by-side photos all by itself as you pivot it in space; you don’t have to press the shutter yourself. Then it stitches all three shots together seamlessly into a triple-wide. It’s just amazing; every camera ought to be this smart.

Kodak’s participation in this project is primarily visible in three areas. First, there’s the image quality, including a one-click photo-enhancement option. Second, the built-in photo-editing software includes commands for cropping, flipping or resizing pictures, adding borders or time- stamps, tweaking brightness, contrast or sharpness and so on.

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Third, there’s that Share button. It can upload the selected photos to a free Kodak Gallery account on the Web; to a free T-Mobile Album on the Web, which can then relay your pictures to photo sites like Snapfish, Picasa or MySpace; by e-mail; wirelessly to a computer using Bluetooth; or to another cellphone as a picture message; or to your blog as a photo posting. Each of these requires as few steps as humanly designable.

(Unfortunately, the free Kodak account doesn’t let you see your photos at full size and resolution. But if you upgrade to the Premier account — $25 a year — you can indeed download your photos at full size, giving you what amounts to a bottomless memory card. You can snap photos forever with your ZN5, uploading them as you go, via Wi-Fi or cellular network, and sleep well, knowing that you have an infinite backup on the Web.)

You can also download your photos to your Mac or PC using a USB cable, as you would from any camera, or view them on a TV using the included cable.

Now, lest expectations run rampant here, let’s set the record straight about the photos: the ZN5 is not an S.L.R. Especially in low light, its pictures look mealier and grainier than what you’d get even from a medium-priced pocket camera. (You can see some samples at nytimes.com/personaltech.)But among cellphones, forget it; the ZN5’s photos trump anything offered by any carrier in the United States. Its 5-megapixel images are as clear, bright and detailed as what you’d get from a low-end digital camera, and they look perfectly fine when printed as enlargements up to, say, 16 by 20 inches.

It’s not the first high-resolution cellphone. There are other 5-megapixel models, and 8-, 9- and even 10-megapixel models are on the way, at least overseas. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean you get better pictures — just bigger versions of the same terrible ones.

The ZN5 isn’t even the first camera-centric phone. The Nokia N82 and Sony K850i are among its closest rivals — the Nokia takes especially terrific pictures — but they’re not offered by any American carrier. You have to buy them “unlocked,” at four to six times the price of the ZN5, and supply a cellphone-service chip yourself.

Nor is the ZN5 perfect. It’s a T-Mobile phone, meaning that coverage in the United States is limited (although if you pay steep roaming fees, you can use it overseas). It can’t use T-Mobile’s fledgling high-speed 3G Internet network. The menu system takes some time to learn. There’s a self-timer, but no self-portrait mirror or screen. Surprisingly, the ZN5’s video recordings are small, jerky and blurry.

Most painful of all, the ZN5 doesn’t have an optical zoom at all—only a digital one. Essentially, all it does it blow up a photo, degrading it in the process.

But considering how well the ZN5 fulfills its mission — melding a real digital camera and a real cellphone with very little compromise in size, photo quality or complexity — those flaws are easy to forgive. Next to this phone camera, all those billions of camera phones look like a bunch of Fisher-Price My First Digital Cameras.

David Pogue is a columnist for the New York Times and contributor to CNBC. He can be emailed at: .

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