Camera Phones Plaza

At an event in Cape Town, South Africa last week, Motorola unveiled their new line of flagship handsets for the year. The MotoRIZR ("riser") Z3, formally known as the Capri, is the company's new quad-band GSM/EDGE slider handset. In fact, the MotoRIZR Z3 is Motorola's first slider handset to be available globally.

One of the key features of the MotoRIZR Z3 is a good quality 2 megapixel digital camera. The camera has a dedicated shutter button on the side of the phone and works in a landscape orientation, just like a regular camera does. Image quality seems to be much better than what we have come to expect from past Motorola megapixel cameras. Other highlights on the Z3 include a microSD/TransFlash memory card slot for photos and music, and Bluetooth A2DP stereo support.

The slider mechanism on the Z3 is a doubly sprung, meaning that the handset snaps into both the open and closed position once moved far enough with the user's thumb. The spring action on the units we tested in Cape Town are still somewhat stiffly sprung, but not as much so as the early prototype that we featured last month. But with that said, the units we used in Cape Town were still stamped with a prototype designation. The keypad design is very similar to that found in the RAZR line of handsets, but has a cleaner and more easily used layout. The tactile response of the keypad appears to have been improved a bit as well.

In terms of software and firmware, the MotoRIZR makes use of the latest version of the Motorola UI we've seen in other devices. It has an updated phone book with new search and more supported data fields, pop-up menus, and support for Motorola's new MotoSYNC system for synchronizing with Microsoft Exchange Server. The MotoRIZR phones we had access to were running a very early version of firmware, and as such were not quite ready for prime time. When complete, though, they should work very much like the MotoKRZR K1 phones that we used, which were very quick and stable.

Motorola expects the MotoRIZR Z3 to start shipping in this half of 2006, and has not provided any solid pricing information, though they hinted that it would probably have a similar cost to what the RAZR V3 had when it was first made available.

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