11 May 2008
The Motorola MOTO Z10 is the successor to the MOTO Z8. It is another kick slide mobile phone but its main features are unusually its video recording and extensive video editing capabilities. Motorola has put genuinely new features on the new Motorola Z10 mobile phone.

When it is closed the Motorola Z10 is a fashionable but not shocking with its smooth black casing. The Z10 measures 110 x 51 x 16 mm and weighs an unsurprisingly heavy 119g. But slide open the Motorola Z10 and its clear you're working with something a bit different. Introduced for the Motorola Z8, the kick slide mechanism of the MOTO Z10 means that when opened, the phone curves to better fit your face rather than just being flat like most slider phones. This is great because the sound quality for the other caller is better as the microphone is a bit closer to your mouth, but when closed the handset is still flat. Closing it is slightly tricky compared to normal sliders as you basically have to bend the Z10 flat and then slide it closed. However, you'll get used to it quickly so Motorola have designed the slider phone with the advantages of a clamshell phone.

The Motorola Z10 has a high quality screen to support its video and photo functions, a 2.2 inch QVGA TFT screen with 16 million colours displayed on 240 by 320 pixels. The images on the screen are really vibrant and even show up well in moderate sunlight. Beneath the screen is an easily mastered scroll wheel with a select button in the middle. Either side of the scroll wheel is a set of 6 menu buttons that are just a bit too close together, although they still look very smart. Below them, is the number keypad, probably the biggest design flaw of the Motorola Z10 being that the 1, 2, and 3 numbers are a bit tricky to access due to the kick slider shape.

The Motorola Z10 has a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and 8x digital zoom. This might seem like a low resolution now for a mobile phone handset of this calibre, but the Z10's camera is great for other reasons. The focal range goes down to just 10 cm meaning that close ups on the Z10 come out well. Also, the hardware on the phone is really fast so that it takes less than 2 seconds to turn on the camera feature. When you're using the screen as a viewfinder, it displays 20 frames per second avoiding the jumpy picture that is common to other mobile phone camera viewfinders. The LED flash was somewhat disappointing though, as we'd have liked to have seen a Xenon flash like on the LG Viewty.

The video capabilities of the Motorola Z10 are what sets it apart from other mobile phones. Capable of recording in both MPEG4 and H.263 format, the Z10 takes videos in the not so massive QVGA resolution. What increases the quality of MOTO Z10 videos is that they can be taken at 30 frames per second, more than most cameras. This is plenty for providing improved quality videos but doesn't allow for slowing down the video to the same extent as the 120 frames per second of the LG Viewty. That said, it's the video editing software loaded on the phone that takes the Z10 several steps beyond other mobile phones. It allows you to crop clips and then put them together on a storyboard. You can choose from a range of both professional and gimmicky transitions between clips and then add text with a much better look than the basic text display at the bottom of the screen offered by other mobile phones. Once you're done, the phones has 3.5G HSDPA connection so that you can relatively quickly upload your edited video directly to Youtube, Facebook or other similar websites.

Although it may not be useful to that many people, the Motorola Z10 supports playback of more audio formats than we've seen on other mobile phones, including AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WAV, AMR NB, MP4, MP3, MIDI, G.726, iMelody and WMA. And the video player is of course very good. To show off the video player, O2 are offering all three Bourne movies free on a MicroSDHC card provided with the handset. There is even Bluetooth Stereo A2DP so you can watch movies and listen to music in stereo sound with your bluetooth headphones.

The performance of the Motorola Z10 is overall superb, largely due to the customised version of Symbian OS 9.2 and the 120MB of ROM. With these features don't expect to make do with the internal memory but the Z10 has an SDHC slot that has been future proofed to support MicroSDHC cards up to 32GB in size, even though they're only currently available in sizes up to 8GB. Making allowances for future developments is an unusual quality in mobile phone manufacturers who usually expect users to replace their phone yearly. The Z10 is quad band and has a battery allowing for 380 hours of standby, although this same battery will only last for 3.5 hours of video playback.

The Motorola Z10 is an excellent mobile video tool and a really good mobile phone too. Perhaps increasing the frames per second capability to 120 would have been nice, but it still has more than enough to produce high quality mobile phone videos and work as a powerful camera and media player.

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