Exceptional mobile phone. Actually I consider it to be the Motorola’s MASTERPIECE. Motorola is known to manufacture mobile phones with rock solid built quality using top notch & expensive materials like steel, aluminum, mineral glass rather than glossy plastic commonly used by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG. The ZN5 is no exception either; it is almost built in metal & has a thick mineral glass over the TFT display matrix which is excellent. The set looks a feels like a monolith.
Actually a very famous website https://smape.com did a durability test on ZN5 and in one of their tests they rode over the ZN5 lying in the road on a Honda CRV weighing 2.5 tones. The ZN5 passed with flying colors. Only the mineral glass cover over the display was broken but the mobile phone operated normally receiving calls, playing music etc.
The display in ZN5 is way ahead of the European contenders like Nokia & Sony Ericsson. Actually mobile phones which are manufactured in Japan by Japanese companies have exceptional displays & generally are way better than the European counterparts. Just think about top LCD screen manufactures of the world – Sharp, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC, etc all reside in Japan. Whereas European mobile phone manufactures use TFT displays manufactured by local European companies, Motorola uses TFT display manufactured by Sharp Corporation of Japan.
The phone is all about the camera and it does not disappoint on that ground. Believe me, it is currently the BEST 5 MP camera available today, make no mistake about it. Only the Nokia N82 comes close. Motorola ZN5 is also the industry first to introduce VARIABLE APERTURE technology in the camera unit of ZN5.
The hardware found in ZN5 almost represents the hardware of a stealth fighter plane i.e. built to kill its opposition. Running on a Freescale MXC275-30 platform having 532 MHz ARM11 processor speaks for itself. Also it has two Image Processing Units(IPU) instead of one and thus can handle image & video much better than its opposition. Internal memory is 512 MB which is huge, also you can extend it up to 4GB with a microSD card.
Audio sound quality from the music player is awesome. Believe me some of the renowned Russian websites like https://smape.com, https://mobile-review.com, etc known for their thorough review have told that the ZN5 can challenge the mighty Apple iPod on this ground which, literally speaking is phenomenal for any mobile phone. After using Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung I have to accept that ZN5 is the best when it comes to sound quality.
This mobile phone is capable of playing videos of very high bitrates(Higher bitrates means better quality) due to its 2 IPU’s & 208 Mhz DSP Bitrates as high as 1100 kbps can be played easily.
Some technical details of Motorola ZN5
HARDWARE*
Platform: Freescale MXC275-30
Processors: 532 Mhz, ARM11 Applications Processor, 208 Mhz Digital Signal Processor(DSP)
RAM : 64 MB, SDRAM
ROM: 128 MB, EEPROM
Internal Memory: 512 MB, Flash
GRAPHICAL SUBSYSTEM*
Display Manufacturer : Sharp Corporation(Japan)
Display Type: Color, Transflective TFT display
Display Diagonal: 2.4 inch, 240 X 320 pixels
BUILT IN DIGITAL CAMERA*
Sensor Type: CMOS, Autofocus
Lens Manufacturer/ Material : Carl Zeiss, Plastic
Lens Diameter/ Focal Length: 3 mm/ 5.56 mm
Aperture/range: Variable Aperture(Industry First for Mobile Phones**)/(f2.8/ f5.6)
Shutter Type: Mechanical shutter
Shutter Speed: 1/60 – 1/1000