Most people confuse the Motorola ZN5 with the Motorola Krave ZN4, the truth of the matter is the two devices couldn’t be more different. Although the ZN4 has a touch screen, the ZN5 has sexy sleek design with a full set of physical controls. The Motorola ZN5’s handset feels great in the hand. It’s both sturdy and comfortable without being excessively hefty.

The beautiful Motorola ZN5 has a gorgeous 2.4-inch display (320×240) takes up almost half of the phone’s front. With support for 262,000 colors, graphics were sharp and colors were vibrant. Although it comes with a pretty decent users guide there will be no need for it. The Motorola ZN5 has a straight forward user friendly menus similar to that of the Motorola Rokr E8. One little design flaw is that the text size is not adjustable, but it should be big enough for most users. On a positive note the display is easier to see in direct light than on many other cell phones.

The navigation toggle and central OK button are a little on the small side for my taste. However they designers did think to at least raise them above the surface of the phone. The numerical buttons on the phone has tiny silver bumps like those on the Rokr E8 assist in dialing by feel. The toggle doubles as a shortcut control to four user-defined features.

Just when you think it was over the Motorola ZN5 has another little surprise. The backlighting on the ZN5’s keypad changes when you’re in camera mode. When snapping photos, you can access the photo gallery via a control between the “5” and “6” keys. What’s more, when you’re browsing the photo gallery, other controls appear for deleting a photo, going back to the camera mode, or accessing the photo share feature. In both environments, it’s a nice touch.

The ZN5 is all about photography, so we’ll start there. Kodak had a hand in the inner camera workings, though both Moto and Kodak declined to state specifics. As we said earlier, the camera starts automatically when you open the ZN5’s lens cover. You can shoot photos in four resolutions, from 5 megapixels down to 1.2 megapixels. As you’d expect, editing options are more than plentiful. The camera offers an autotimer, a low light setting, three focus settings (auto, landscape, and macro), five white balance settings (daylight, cloudy, tungsten, auto, and fluorescent), a multishot mode, and six shutter sounds, plus a silent option. The flash is full Xenon, so it’s quite effective under almost all conditions. It has four settings: on, red-eye reduction, auto, or off. Our only complaint was that the “auto” setting appeared to be rather sensitive. It fired even when we were indoors under strong lighting, which caused our subjects to be washed out. We recommend you play around with it when shooting.

Though many camera phones–and many standalone cameras for that matter–suffer from a noticeable shutter lag, the ZN5 has a click-to-capture duration of .02 seconds. The camera is always in auto mode, so you can’t set the aperture or shutter speed manually. But depending on the lighting conditions, the camera will choose an aperture of f/2.8 to f/5.6 and a shutter speed of 1/60 to 1/1,000 seconds. The ZN5’s focal length is 5.56mm.

I will tell you my favorite feature on the Motorola ZN5… It’s the panorama mode. After you snap your first shot of your three shot panorama, the ZN5 will vibrate until you move it to the correct position for the next shot. Once you have located the appropriate position the camera will snap the next shot automatically. The panorama feature is definitely easy to use and is similar to the Samsung Innov8.

The photo quality on the Motorola ZN5 is simply outstanding. Dare I say that it is the best that I have seen so far. The colors were vibrant and crisp. I brought the photo to my MacBook Pro and pulled it up in PhotoShop. There was absolutely no blurriness or image noise ( for the most part ). The Motorola ZN5 was didn’t fare to well in dimly lit situations. The flash needs a little work, which I hope to see in future upgrades. It is a bit sensitive to say the least and I did have a few photos that were blown out.

Since I mentioned transferring photos to my MacBook Pro I would like to thank Motorola and Kodak for making it easy to get photos off the phone. You have a variety of options to transfer your photos. You can transfer them to your computer or photo printer using a USB cable, a memory card, and a Bluetooth, or you can send them in a multimedia message.

The music player on the Motorola ZN5 is a little generic. For some strange reason they decided to use the Moto media player for WMA and MP3 files. The player is compatible with Windows Media Player 11, so you can drag tunes to the phone from your computer using a USB cable.

The battery life of the Motorola ZN5 is incredible. It offers 9.5 hours of talk time and up to 22.87 days standby time. Actual battery life will vary depending on how you use the phone. For example, heavy camera use will drain more power than just making calls.