RPV Blogster

I have been using Motorola ZN5 or MotoZine for about a month and it is a wonderful phone with a 5 megapixel camera by Kodak. The cell quality is wonderful in this phone and I have not had a missed call so far. In this review, I am not going into some basic details which are already present in the user guide or present in other online reviews. Most of this review is regarding non-phone features of ZN5 and I call ZN5 as a mini-PDA or even a mini computer. Address book sync up, phone settings, bluetooth, speakerphone quality are all excellent. The main reason we got this phone is for its camera apart from the obvious reason of making phone calls. Got 2 from TMobile for the family plan. I will attach many sample photos taken by this camera. It can take 4 GB Micro SDHC card, Reports suggest it will also take a 8 GB card (unofficial). I am posting many screenshots of the camera screen because this is often lacking in userguides and people find this extremely useful while deciding to buy cameras or reading reviews. Instructions for taking camera screenshots are from motomodding website. Telnet and ftp need to be enabled on phone and one can telnet to phone through "telnet 192.168.16.2". ZN5 runs Linux.

• uname -a reports Linux 2.6.1T0_dev armv61

Another interesting source of information is US FCC website. Link for all ZN5 information in FCC website is here. The phone's menu can be confusing at times if you have used many phones and it takes a week to get used to it. The phone can be used as a USB hard disk also for storage.


The phones main menu. Some of these menus can be drilled down several levels down.


An example second level menu. The menu items can be reordered as you will see in a screenshot later. I moved Opera browser to a different menu section.


The phone has WiFi built in and it is extremely useful to check quick emails or watch weather or to watch videos. Many of these are disabled by TMobile and I hear the Asian counterparts permit most of these functions by default. Gmail or google maps (or any java apps are disabled and more on that later). WiFi range is awesome. I was able to get clear reception on Cupertino library parking lot for library members and watch some youtube videos. I am not sure why TMobile is so restrictive, but choices are very limited in US compared to other countries for phone and 3G services. Fortunately as Motorola ZN5 runs Linux, many of these can be opened up. Even firmware can be flashed to the Asian firmware, but I have not done that yet. Most of my requirements seem to be met as of now.



The phone is extremely friendly as a multimedia device. One of the other major reason for me to get ZN5 was to use as a MP3 player. I was disappointed by Zune's ability to add music to player. It was very frustrating. Also I am not a big fan of Ipod though the interface is very nice. All I need is a manual way to add files through a drag and drop interface and I will delete and add files when I need. I do not need a fancy UI or the genius feature as they claim in itunes telling me which song I should listen next. I can make that decision, Thank You Mr. Steve Jobs. ZN5 performs great for my mp3 requirements. I can drop mp3 files and the player organizes them nicely into various categories based on tags. If there are large collection of new music, it can take a while to index on the phone. A while meaning 15 minutes, which is a setback, but i can live with that. This is only after adding large collection. If you use MPT, or windows media player it may not have this problem, but I am not a big fan of those tools. Just give me a simple interface. All I want is to listen to music on a music player not some crappy user interface which needs a 300 page user guide or a book to master. In that respect ZN5 has high marks. You can also download mp3 podcasts directly from websites and store it in SD card and play it. I used it to download podcasts from several sites and play it while at a library.



Brief look at the photo viewing screen. More later also. This review obviously will contain lot regarding ZN5 camera as it is one of the hot features.



Miscellanious screens. Radio (FM) is useful while travelling on train to get some latest news. I use only news station on FM anyway and not a big fan of the music that comes on FM. My 4 GB SD card serves me faithfully on music I like. But FM radio for NPR listening is good enough for me.


Camera controls and knobs. Very obvious for digital camera users, The controls will get a little used to as the buttons on ZN5 has to be used. It is as simple as it can get, and I got them in few minutes. I took around 200 photos in first few weeks and I am enclosing sample photos, unedited at the end of this review for you to see and judge. Having a 5 megapixel camera with you always is an advantage!


The camera has WiFi, so browsing and checking email are possible. The built in browser, Symphony is not a good one, but is useful to download Opera Mini which is a real browser. More on that later.



Google Maps is a useful tool for the phone for variety of purposes. One can quickly check the traffic condition on a road before leaving home or office. I use GPS for most daily travels, so this tool is useful for doing search based locations, or for traffic. You cannot install the app on the native phone. TMobile has stupidly locked any java applications. Motomodding.US has provided wonderful instructions to enable and unlock any java apps, but remember to backup phone before any modding. Various factors such as bootloader version, firmware version may impact the modding behavior. Link for unlocking apps here in this thread. Once unlcoked, links for removing sticky apps here.



More Google Maps screenshots, search nearby stores, find directions etc.



More google maps screenshots. Searching eating in google results in eating disorder clinics! Probably I should have searched for restaurants.



Searching for schools gives one of the most prestgious and expensive schools in my area. I wonder if the searches are paid or sponsored by the entities! Maybe just a coincidence, but I did not see public schools or other private schools on the top of search results. On ZN5, there are other settings that are useful, like making it airline friendly, checking memory statistics etc. They come in handy many times.




Installed Opera Mini on ZN5 and and it has to be unlocked as per motomodding site as linked previously. The browser works fast on ZN5 and can be used to look at news and other quick facts. You can also watch it to see youtube videos, but it may need some tweaking on the router to allow traffic. Instructions on motomodding site.. After few trials following worked for me on my DLink router.

Go to adanced>Application Click enable
trigger port...554..leave second box empty
trigger type... UDP
Public port...6970-6999
public type..udp

On virtual server screen
click enabled
private ip...192.168.0.xxx
protocol type ..UDP
ptivate port 6970
public port 6970
and Click always and apply
repeat it again and add port 6972 for public and private port

Gmail for Mobile is the most useful java app I found for ZN5. You can view multiple accounts and do many things. One thing I found lacking was ability to add attachments. I was trying to mail some jpg images, but this is a improvement Google should do immediately. I emailed google for this feature request.


Including photos taken by ZN5. The above photo and its EXIF information are provided to give insight into camera details. If you click on the photo, it will give the original size photograph. I am including photos taken on a bright outside on a car dealer, on a cloudy day at farmers market, on some indoor stores.



Indoor photos with ZN5. (Click to see full size).


Outdoor photos (click to see full size).



More outdoor photos. Taken on cloudy rain day. Click on image for full size. I will take a photo in panorama mode and upload it soon.

ZN5 runs Linux, and we can ftp or telnet to it among many other things. Guide to that here. It is using Mobilinux 4.1 (from /etc/motd) and like many recent phones Linux seem to be getting popular on smartphones and PDAs. It can run many services and /etc/services includes almost all services. I am sure it can act as a web server too!. Here is a sample command output of df -k for seeing how much memory is used in internal and external (SD card) memory.

Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                41072     41072         0 100% /
none                      4096       388      3708   9% /dev/shm
/dev/mtdblock/pds         1152       864       288  75% /etc/pds
/dev/mtdblock/setup         64        64         0 100% /usr/setup
/dev/mtdblock/secure        32        32         0 100% /usr/securesetup
/dev/mtdblock/user        9216      2836      6380  31% /ezxlocal
/dev/mtdblock/lang        7216      7216         0 100% /usr/language
/dev/mtdblock/resrc      20608     20608         0 100% /usr/data_resource
/dev/mtdblock/mass_storage   154112      7024    147088   5% /mnt/msc_int0
/dev/loop/0             143607      2627    140981   2% /ezxlocal/download/mystuff
/dev/mmca1             3971584   1572192   2399392  40% /mmc/mmca1

You can run ifconfig -a and get all packet statistics if you need to troubleshoot any link slowness. part of ifconfig -a output.

usbl0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
        inet addr:192.168.16.2  Bcast:192.168.16.7  Mask:255.255.255.248
        UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
        RX packets:3366 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
        TX packets:1943 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
        collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
        RX bytes:3652258 (3.4 MiB)  TX bytes:128828 (125.8 KiB)

Overall, ZN5 is a outstanding device (phone/camera/mp3 player/radio/USB drive/etc). I have not revieed many other features like connecting to TV (cable was included), taking video, video playback. Phone quality and reception are outstanding and that is most important to a phone. Motorola has always excelled in that category. With a camera and a no frills mp3 player, ZN5 is a great buy.

Labels: "Motorola ZN5 review", Cameraphone, Motorola ZN5, Motozine, ZN5