Motorola RIZR Z3

You've met the type. Good looking, appealing, friendly, helpful, and perhaps just a little slow. No, I'm not talking about the guy next door. I'm referring to Motorola's RIZR Z3. This solid cell phone offers good voice quality and a powerful 2-megapixel camera, and it is good enough all around to be our Editors' Choice for a feature phone on T-Mobile.

The RIZR is the latest retread design from the House of RAZR, this time taking the RAZR's basic design and turning the model into a sharp-snapping slider phone. The 1.7 by 4.5 by 0.6 inch, 3.8-ounce RIZR's build is impeccable. With a readable-in-sunlight 176-by-220 color screen, a very usable cursor pad, and an extremely solid hinge that slides up to reveal very RAZR-like flat keys with rubbery cutouts for tactile cues, the phone is smartly crafted.

Reception and sound quality are spot-on. Voice quality is very clear, well-rounded, and appealing, with just a bit of scratchiness at top volume. The speakerphone also sounds great, though it's too quiet to overpower, say, the noise from a passing truck. Voice-dialing is provided by the excellent, no-training-needed VoiceSignal suite. In addition, the RIZR uses Motorola's new phone book, which displays entries with multiple phone numbers on one line and lets you search by multiple characters, a big improvement over the old RAZR contacts list. You can sync over contact info from your PC using the included Motorola Mobile Phone Tools software and USB cable. Battery life, with 10 hours of continuous talk time, is good but not great for an EDGE phone.

The RIZR's 2MP camera is a pleasant surprise. It takes sharp, well-balanced pictures with very good dynamic range, in high or low light. The phone saves pictures to a microSD card, which can be as large as 2GB. The card is under the back cover, but you don't have to remove the battery or reboot the phone to remove it. A video mode records up to an impressive 352-by-288 resolution at 15 frames per second, but it wobbles a bit. Video shot at 176-by-144 resolution, however, looked fine.

Bundled with the RIZR is a music player that's very basic and takes a long time to load, but it'll do. It plays MP3 or unprotected AAC music through either the mediocre included earbuds or through stereo Bluetooth headphones. It worked well with our Plantronics Pulsar 590 Bluetooth headphones. Bluetooth in general worked well, if a bit slowly. I connected to both the Pulsar and a Plantronics Voyager 510 without hearing pops or clicks, and transferred files to and from a Mac and a PC at about 240 Kbps. You can do dial-up networking, too, using T-Mobile's EDGE network, which has about double the speed of dial-up.

There's one big disadvantage with the RIZR. The phone's user interface can be really slow. That's in large part because unlike the marvelous Motorola RAZR V3xx for Cingular, the RIZR is still using a poky old ARM7 processor to drive an increasingly media-heavy experience. The result is that it takes longer to load applications, to respond to button presses, and, especially, for the Web browser to respond. Moving through WAP pages on this phone can be particularly excruciating—it's best not to open the browser at all.

The RIZR falls in the middle of T-Mobile's perplexing, obnoxious restrictions on third-party software. With this phone, if you load an "unapproved" (meaning the makers didn't pay a fee to T Mobile to get on the service) application such as Google Maps, Yahoo! Go Mobile, or Opera Mini, you'll have to click "OK" every time it accesses the Internet. This is annoying and unacceptable, but at least it's better than the Nokia 5300, which blocks out those apps entirely.

The Motorola RIZR Z3 isn't the best feature phone in the U.S.; that award goes to Cingular's RAZR V3xx. But it's the best phone available on T-Mobile today. The Nokia 5300 is also very good (and has a much better music player), but its quirky design gives it less appeal. Also, applications are even more restricted on the 5300 than they are on the RIZR. That makes the RIZR the T-Mobile phone to beat, and an all-around winner.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 10 hours 12 minutes
Jbenchmark 1: 1535
Jbenchmark 2: 37

Compare the Motorola RIZR Z3 with several other mobile phones side by side.