Motorola Rokr Z6

By Damian Koh
Jul 10, 2007

Announced in February at 3GSM this year, the Motorola ROKR Z6 is exciting not because of its sleek design or that it is running on a Linux/Java-based platform, owing to its squeaky clean user interface. As we take it through its paces, the ROKR Z6 appears to have many things going for it.

Design
In hand, the ROKR Z6 feels solid and it's obvious the phone has a much shorter width compared with the Razrs. We're not fans of glossy surfaces but the polished back material on the front didn't bother us a lot. The top lid is spring-loaded so all we had to do was to give it a little nudge before it snapped into place. Closing it locks the keypad automatically--a feature that's taken for granted but sorely missing from the Nokia E65.

Like the rest of the Motorola lineup, the ROKR Z6 makes use of flat metallic keys for its controls. The main buttons on the top lid are reasonably large and provide tactile feedback. What we didn't find comfortable was the top row of the numeric keypad which are just too near to the bottom edge of the top lid. Though there's a concave edge forming an angle with the bottom shell, people with larger digits may still find it harder to type.

What's nice is that Motorola has added a rubber strip that runs horizontally across the numeric keypad. That is probably for users to feel the different keys, even though it didn't serve much purpose during actual use. Because it was announced earlier, the Z6 still comes with the chin at the bottom of the numeric keypad unlike the new Razr2s that have done away with the bulge.

Ostensibly missing from the exterior is the memory card slot. This is hidden underneath the battery cover above the SIM card slot. We didn't like the feeling that we might scratch our microSD card each time we put it in or took it out.

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