Motorola MOTORIZR Z8 - first impressions

Resembling an overgrown highlighter pen, the black and green colour scheme of Motorola’s MOTORIZR Z8 is original and won’t immediately draw everybody towards it with coos of delight, but it will attract some people and we rather like it.

In all other respects, the phone gives the impression of being like every other slider phone. Its front comprises screen and a few controls, with the number keypad hidden away until it is required. Holding the thing in your hand, you'd have no reason to believe it won’t just slide open like any other slider phone.

And indeed it does. Up to a point. Where other sliders open with a ramrod straight backbone, the MOTORIZR Z8 incorporates what Motorola calls its ‘kick slider’. This amounts to a hinge in the back of the casing which means the phone is curved when opened.

This curve is something you’ll either love or hate. Moto says it makes the phone fit better to your face, mimicking the angle of a flip phone to bring the mike closer to your lips when you make calls. Well, it does that. Whether you like the bendy phone is all about personal taste though.

Curvature aside, the Z8 has a few other plus points that aren’t as apparent at first glance. There is 80MB of internal memory plus a microSD card slot if you need to boost that.

But that’s not what Moto is shouting about. Nope. The HelloMoto feature par excellence of this handset is its ability to play video at up to 30 frames a second. That means you can use it to watch movies like the copy of The Bourne Identity that's bundled with the phone.

We tried this, and frankly it just doesn’t cut the mustard for us. Yes the 240x320-pixel, 16-million colour screen is impressive. But we’d rather watch our movies in the cinema or at least on our widescreen tellies. Cramping up to look at them on a mobile seems, well, disrespectful to the cinematographic art.

Another red herring, unless you are some sort of telly addict, is the pre installed Sky Anytime application. You can use this to programme your Sky box, but we’d suggest you get a life instead.

What we like more is the phone’s ability to send stereo music to Bluetooth headphones and the fact that Moto bundles its very own Bluetooth S9 headset. It shares the phone’s mains power charger. The headset has comfortable in-ear buds and easy to use side-mounted controls. Lovely. If you want, you can use the bundled wired headset instead.

This is an HSDPA handset with a front facing camera for those video calling moments and 2 megapixel back facing camera for shooting stills and video. The camera isn’t overly impressive in terms of its stills quality.

In case you are thinking this phone is all about entertainment, we should point out that it runs a Symbian operating system (a non touch sensitive version of UIQ if you must know), and alongside the Web browser come mobile email, calendar and contacts applications and the ability to synchronise with a PC if you need to.