We snap open Motorola's newest slider, the Moto Z9, a clear cousin to the RAZR2 family. Is it an underachiever like its kin?
Review summary of the Motorola Z9:
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 The Motorola Z9 isn't a bad choice for a phone, it just isn't a very exciting choice, either. Call quality was very good, and it has all our favorite calling features, including a robust address book and speaker-independent voice dialing. Music, too, was a solid feature, with plenty of options. But none of it was especially appealing or easy to use, so the phone simply fell flat. We'd like to see just a bit more polish all around. A thinner shell, a slicker interface, better Web browsing. Everything on this phone comes so close, but doesn't quite deliver all it could. It does a lot right, but not a lot great. Release: April 2008. Price: $250.
Pros: Nice paint job. Great call quality. Solid build. Navigation tracked us well.
Cons: Not very exciting or elegant, especially for a slider. Keypad wasn't great. Web browser disappointing, especially for Opera.
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Full review of the Motorola Z9:
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Design - Good
The Motorola Z9 is clearly from the RAZR2 family, with its sleek, polished metal exterior and brushed accents. It comes in the same burgundy red as the AT&T RAZR2, has the same heft as well as the same haptic feedback, which vibrates to let you know you've made a selection, though thankfully the Z9 loses the RAZR2's touch sensitive buttons. The keypad on this device is also changed, and we weren't fans of the newer design. The keys are completely flat, though the pad does give way for a surprising amount of travel. Still, we found it easy to miss if we didn't press at just the right point.
The slide mechanism on this phone was solid, maybe a bit too solid. It slid open with a reassuring, and slightly goofy, "click." The whole slider form is unfamiliar to Motorola, and it shows. The phone is wide, with lots of open space around the crisp, bright screen. It's heavier and hulking against elegant sliders from Samsung, like the recent Mysto on Helio. We do like that Motorola has polished up its standard interface a bit, adding some transitional animations and cleaning up the icons a bit. But this is still a far cry from a pretty phone, inside or out.
Calling - Very good
AT&T brags about the Crystal Talk technology on this phone, but we just didn't hear it. Calls sounded very good, don't get us wrong. Indoors and out, even on the busy New York streets, we were able to make our calls. But we didn't get the feeling that noise was being handled any more deftly than on another high quality calling phone. In fact, because of where the microphone was placed, we got occasional noise from scraping our faces.
The Motorola Z9 does include all of our favorite calling features, including Bluetooth for handsfree calling and a robust address book that had plenty of fields for storing contact info. The speakerphone was nice and loud, and conference calling was easy to accomplish. Voice dialing is speaker independent, so no need to program voice tags. For battery life, we got almost five hours, but much of that time was spent out of HSDPA range, with only the EDGE icon lit, which could have bumped our test upwards.
Messaging - Good
The Moto Z9 on AT&T has some fairly standard messaging options. Perhaps not every service is supported, but users will find all the major options easily available. The phone choked sending an MMS message of a photo taken with the 2-megapixel camera, but the image wasn't that good anyway. Instant messaging and e-mail support are both included with various clients and presets, but Google is left out of both of those parties, which is fine for IM but surprising for e-mail, especially when some regional cable ISPs make the cut.
Typing on the phone's keys wasn't especially pleasant, but wasn't as bad as we initially suspected it might be. The keys are flat, but still have plenty of give. Still, the active zone you can press isn't very wide, so it was easy to miss a letter entirely. The phone uses iTap for intuitive texting, but the autocomplete could use an overhaul. It suggested lazying and jazzing to complete our test message, neither of which are real words.
Music - Good
The music player on the Motorola Z9 is simple and ugly, but it has some nice features backing it up to improve the whole experience. We used a card synchronized with Windows Media Player, and all our tracks came through fine, including our Napster music, since this is an AT&T Music phone. We didn't find any music store on the device, so you'll have to sideload until AT&T starts pushing the download service. The phone had some nice preset EQ options that helped the sound a bit, and also supported playlists and various playback modes. Setting up stereo Bluetooth speakers was a snap, and the setup process was available from the media player menu, which made it even easier.
Video - Mediocre
The phone uses AT&T's Cellular Video for streaming clips, and we'd advise skipping this service. Videos may have loaded quickly thanks to the phone's fast networking, but clips looked horrible. At their smallest size, they still looked blurry, and blown up to full screen things obviously deteriorated. CNN was unwatchable, at least if captions are meaningful to your viewing experience. There were no speed issues, like we said, but at this point our standards are much higher, especially since we've seen the phones that run the upcoming AT&T Mobile TV service.
Camera - Good
Images taken with the Moto Z9 weren't horrible, and that's being generous to a camera phone. Colors were okay, but edges and details were fuzzy at best, and oversharpened at worst. Images were noisy, even at the camera's best settings. We did like that the camera isn't hidden by the slide, but with middling performance, and the fact that the camera crashed on us sending an MMS message, means we won't be relying on the lens for anything more than celebrity sightings.
Web browsing - Mediocre
Opening up the About page on the Web browser, we were shocked to find it was an Opera program. The quality was not up to what we've come to expect from Opera and the Opera Mini browsers. Pages were rendered in a pinched, mobile layout, and looked muddy and poor. Text styles came through poorly, and images, like our masthead, were blocky and pixilated. Nothing we found in the settings could improve the situation, either. We wish we could report a competent browser with a mini-map that takes advantage of the fast, HSDPA networking, but that isn't the case on the Moto Z9.
Navigation - Good
The Motorola Z9 is among the first phone's we're seeing with the newly rebranded AT&T Navigation service. It isn't much to get excited about, just the TeleNav navigation app with AT&T's name stuck on it. Our Z9 had a lot of trouble finding us at first in lower Manhattan, perhaps blocked by the tall buildings around us. But, once we got out of the city, it was fairly smooth sailing. The voice navigations were quick and accurate, and they tracked us nicely as we missed turn after turn. Eventually, on one harebrained trip, the navigation program simply gave up and told us we were off course, but we simply started our trip again from our current spot, and the directions resumed, no problem.
Price and availability
The Motorola Z9 is available now from AT&T for $250 with a contract agreement. A mail-in rebate of $50 is available, when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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