5 megapixel Motorola Zine ZN5 to be launched tomorrow?
Monday, March 31st, 2008
Motorola has been working on a 5 megapixel camera phone in collaboration with Kodak for what seems like years. Finally, the partnership might be about to bear fruit with the launch of the new Motorola Zine ZN5 camera phone at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas tomorrow.
The Zine will be the first phone released since Motorola split itself in two in an attempt to stop the company’s mobile phone division slipping even further into the red. This won’t make the Zine any good, though, as it still comes from a company whose last innovation was to paint the RAZR pink and sell it as a new phone!
More pics and derision after the jump.
Indeed, you get a sense of how bad the new Zine will be when you read that it looks like the ROKR E8 (see the above pic - it’s the phone on the left), which didn’t exactly set the world on fire, and despite having a 5 megapixel camera (which will therefore lead to some pretty huge files), will only come with EDGE connectivity. Yup, that’s right - not even 3G let alone HSDPA, just super-slow EDGE, which gives data transfer speeds not all that dissimilar to ye olde dial-up!
So, prepare for a lot of Motorola hype tomorrow when CTIA Vegas opens its doors, but expect to be sorely disappointed. Motorola’s mobile handset division is in deep trouble at the moment because it failed to compete in terms of style, features, marketing and any kind of understanding of what the consumer actually wants; don’t expect all that to change just because the company has spun off its mobile handset division.
[Source: UnwiredView]
It looks like soldiers could one day have their own tab key of sorts to call up detailed, 3D maps at will, at least if the folks at General Dynamics UK have their way. As Physorg reports, they’ve developed a “near real-time” 3D map system that makes use of an array of different technologies including LIDAR, thermal imaging and x-ray backscatter techniques to not only display buildings and streets, but objects and people inside buildings as well. The use of LIDAR also promises to provide measurements of doors, windows, and alleys with “millimeter accuracy.” All that obviously makes the system, dubbed Masthead, slightly less than portable, however, although General Dynamics says it’d be able to be carried in the back of a military vehicle or civilian 4×4, or in a plane for that matter. Of course, like most such projects, General Dynamics isn’t just setting its sights to military applications, with it also touting Masthead’s potential benefits for police forces in planning security measures for large events, to name one example.
