We Covet Camera Phones That Are More Camera Than Phone

So, that Motorola Motozine ZN5 - the camera phone that's more camera than phone - that I was talking about last week? Is awesome.

Motorola sent me on a holiday with my kids for the express purpose of testing out the phone in extreme family vacation conditions. You know, under the sort of circumstances where you set your child loose at, oh, say, DisneyWorld, take a picture, send picture to Flickr, take another picture, Twitter about taking the picture, look up and notice that child is racing away toward Tomorrowland, chase child, take another picture, capture child, Twitter about difficulty of wrangling three-year olds at theme parks without border collies or Tasers. The usual holiday stuff.

So, yeah, we went to Disney World, and it was really, really difficult because managing a three-year old and a baby on one's own at the world's greatest monument to childhood excesses is a little exhausting. But! The MotoZine made things a little easier by just being the compact little wonder of communications/media technology that it is. Because the Zine takes great pictures - as I said in the last post, it's a 5 mega-pixel camera with a Xenon flash - there was no need to carry a camera in addition to a phone. There was no fumbling around in bags or pockets in search of one or the other - both were right at hand, in one compact package, strapped to my wrist. And as soon as a picture was taken, I could immediately send it to Flickr or to the Kodak Gallery or to my husband back home. Obviously, you can do much of this with a regular camera phone (one with the necessary web access, that is), but a regular camera phone produces crap thumbnail images, not keepsake photographs. And when your child is pirouetting in front of Cinderella's Castle in a Buzz Lightyear costume, you want a keepsake picture.

I had a few (very minor) quibbles with the Zine - the battery charge only ever lasted me 9 hours, maximum (my Motorola Razr holds a charge for a couple of days), which can be frustrating when you're spending a day and evening out (and all the more frustrating when you're not expecting it to lose its charge, and find yourself out at Disney World after dark with no means of communication or photography), but in fairness, it's a phone that one should expect would eat a lot of power - it's got that camera, after all, and WiFi and a 3G connection and all the bells and whistles that you expect from both phones and cameras. And I rode it pretty hard, taking tons of pictures and Twittering and Flickring. So if it ran through its charge pretty fast, that's kinda to be expected.

It's also a little frustrating to go back to a numeric keypad after using a smartphone with a qwerty keypad - Twitter and Gmail were slow to use sometimes simply because my fingers got sticky trying to type on the numeric pad. But still, it's a small trade-off for being able to take really good pictures and then send or post them right away.

This is the wave of the future, I'm convinced - I'm never going to want to use my old phone's camera again, having experienced the awesomeness of the Motozine. Because life is too short to send bad pictures.

Motorola ZN5 (price varies according to phone plan) @ Motorola.com

(Psst - if you're interested, you can view pictures of the trip - and see what the camera does - at Flickr.)