The Motorola ZINE is a candy-bar shaped camera phone currently offered by T-Mobile for $99 after an instant discount and mail-in rebate with a new 2-year contract. Its biggest claim to fame is a Kodak 5-megapixel camera with an auto-focus lens. It also has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and comes with a full complement of accessories, including a 1GB SD card, TV out cables, and stereo headphones.

The ZINE's interface will be very familiar to anyone who's used a Motorola phone in the past several years. While it's a stable operating system, it definitely doesn't win any awards for intuitiveness or extensibility. Making calls goes quickly, but the ZINE has the worst Send and End keys, and the worst keypad, we've seen in a long time. The Send and End keys are clustered with other buttons, making it easy to accidentally press something else. The numbers on the keypad have no physical separation between them and are easy to press incorrectly as well.

The ZINE has the full contingent of organizer applications to keep your contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes in order, and comes with synchronization software so you can sync it with your PC though Mac users will be out of luck unless they find a 3rd-party solution. These applications are not quite as robust as you'd find a smartphone, but they'll do for basic use. Without a native email application, the ZINE offers only a web portal to check your email, and you must have a network connection to access them and draft emails or any other activity.

Text and multimedia messages can be created and navigated easily on the ZINE, though there's no threaded message view so you can easily keep track of a conversation, and you may encounter a strange error when trying to create an MMS message depending on how you go about it. If you like to browse the web on your cell phone, you'll find the ZINE's browser to be more full-featured than on the average phone with the ability to open multiple pages at once. However, navigating around full-sized web pages on the ZINE's relatively small screen will require a lot of scrolling and will be a little painful in extended browsing sessions.

Music playback on the ZINE works well with playlist and album art support, though it's a very no-frills application otherwise. Video playback will be limited to a small pool of compatible formats and the smaller screen is also a bit of a hindrance here. Also, high bit-rate files won't play back at all, so don't count on the ZINE as the ultimate media device to replace a dedicated player.

In terms of network connectivity, the ZINE can only connect to T-Mobile's slower EDGE and GPRS networks, but as a GSM device, it will offer flexibility to those who travel outside of the U.S. and still want to be able to use the ZINE. With Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, the ZINE can make wireless connections to speed up picture uploads and web browsing. Bluetooth 2.0+EDR is also on board and allows the use of stereo Bluetooth headphones so cords won't get in your way.

Performance (read the full lab performance results at Wirelessinfo.com)

In terms of audio quality during calls, the ZINE performs pretty well, keeping within the performance limits to avoid choppy sounds or wide fluctuations in volume for you or the person on the other end of the line. Side tone, the amount of your own voice piped back to you to help you gauge how loudly you're speaking, is a little too low, however - this may cause you to speak more loudly than you need to as you work to compensate for what your ears are telling you.

In our imaging tests, the ZINE performed exceptionally well in the still image resolution tests, posting the highest score here out of every phone we've ever tested. Unfortunately, this performance does not carry over to video as well where resolution is limited to a ridiculously low figure despite the 5-megapixel camera sensor. The ZINE's color accuracy is about average and it had pretty poor noise results.

In our battery tests, the ZINE performed better than the claimed talk time battery life of "up to 5 hours" at 6 hours and 30 minutes. Music playback battery life wasn't so good, coming in at 6 hours and 59 minutes. Web browsing was the weakest link at 2 hours and 49 minutes, though lower results here are the norm for just about every device we test.

Comparisons (read more in-depth comparisons at Wirelessinfo.com)

If you're looking for a cell phone that can replace your dedicated digital camera in a pinch, the ZINE is a good choice, though we're hard-pressed to recommend it over any dedicated digital camera combined with a free cell phone since even a low-end digital camera will put out better images than the ZINE. If you are bound and determined to have a decent camera combined with a cell phone, the Nokia N82 is a good alternative as a well-rounded device that offers more than the ZINE as a total package, though it has a very high price tag in comparison. The LG Dare is another device with decent digital camera, though it's not at the same level as the ZINE's. The Dare has a touchscreen interface that works pretty well and dialing on it will be a better experience than you'd find on the ZINE with its horrendous keypad.

In the end, the ZINE will take far better pictures than the average cell phone, but worse pictures than a dedicated digital camera. If you absolutely can't stand carrying around a digital camera, or don't really have the need to print your pictures as keepsakes of major events, then go for the ZINE. Other than its camera, the ZINE doesn't offer anything else particularly spectacular, and it will probably be of limited interest to those not looking for a good camera phone.