24 June 2008

Motorola working on a UIQ powered
8 megapixel phone with NVIDIA chipset

It seems that Motorola has taken its legendary experience in mobile hardware and software design and together with Eastman Kodak Company will applied it to a bunch of new phones in a last attempt to bring back the glory days.

By incorporating Kodak's image science and system integration expertise with Motorola iconic mobile device design, the two companies will try to improve the ease-of-use and image capture experience of camera phones.

Unfortunately, the just announced Motorola Motozine ZN5 with its 5 megapixel sensor and xenon flash is not as attractive although it has the famous Kodak brand on the back. In my personal opinion it is just another “dummy” phone with pretty good camera part that can hardly compete with latest Nokia Smartphones like Nokia N82 that simply dose it all. Situation is even worse because Sony Ericsson just announced their latest CyberShot camera phone that features the 8 MPX sensor in the similar form factor.

To be completely honest with you I am not that impressed with 8 megapixel sensor due the various different reasons. The mega pixel race on the digital cameras of the last years seems to have settled down now but in the mobile phone world it seems that there is a completely different trend. Mobile phone manufactures just pump mega pixels while the optics and sensor size basically remain the same and therefore, this trend has a terrible effect on the photo quality.

*click to enlarge

Anyway, ZN5 obviously is not the flag ship product and strategy is to offer 8 megapixel camera with optical zoom, big 2.8″ 16 million color display, “banana slider” form factor, similar to Motorola Z10 and what is the most important for us phone should be powered by the latest version of the Symbian based UIQ platform.

Even better, by some latest rumors, Motorola’s last stand phone that is also known as Alexander, will have built-in GPS, Wi-Fi and VGA resolution touchscreen. Furthermore, device will have a built-in NVIDIA chip (Tegra?) which will handle both video and 3D graphics and release is set for October.

Again, this is definitely Moto’s last big attempt to get back their market share and reclaiming victory. If this line of Kodak branded phones will not gain success it’s all over for them and they will sell the company.