Motorola’s ROKR ZN50 touchscreen music-phone coming to Korea
By Will Park on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 4:53 PM PST In Announcements, Devices, Motorola, New Hardware
It’s about time Motorola (NYSE: MOT) delivered a stand-out touchscreen handset. We haven’t been hearing too much in the way of new products from Motorola in a minute, so it’s good to see the RAZR-maker still alive and kicking. Moto’s latest music-phone is the Motorola ROKR ZN50 handset with a full widget-ized touchscreen interface. Too bad this batch of Motorola ROKR ZN50’s will be shipping to Korea and Korea only.
The feature set is as good as any musicphone available today. The Motorola ZN50 sports a 3.2-inch touchscreen, 3.2-megapixel camera, SRS WOW HD sound system with equalizer, GPS, 3G data (HSDPA 7.2Mbps), Bluetooth 2.0 and 3.5mm headphone jack (nice!). And, because this is a Korea-bound handset, the Motorola ROKR ZN50 features a T-DMB TV tuner.
The Moto ROKR ZN50’s custom touch-based interface seems good enough, but let’s all remember that Motorola’s other feature-phone operating systems consistently failed to deliver a usable UI in the many years since the blockbuster RAZR was launched. As Unwired View points out, it would be interesting to see elements of the ROKR ZN50’s widget-based UI making it to Motorola’s future Android handsets.
[Via: UnwiredView]
It is understandable that the ROKR ZN 50 shoutld have a T-DMB receiver for Mobile TV inthe Korean Market as there are already over 20 million devices able to pick up T-DMB there already.
However, the rest of the world is turning on to T-DMB as well with trials, Pilots and commercial services in Africa, South America, Norway, Malta, Italy, Iteland, Poland, Germany and MANY other areas (S.E. Asis has far to many to detail).
Hopefully Motorola (LG, Samsung) etc will see the market potential and release T-DMB enabled devices as the Norm – rather than limiting them to Korea. Who knows, Nokia may even “Smell the Coffee” and move away from DVB- to aformat that people actual want!