We recently got our hands on the Motorola RIZR Z3 slider phone which the company has released this month along with the MOTOFONE. We had reports about this release as early as July 2006 when we did the preview on the Motorola RIZR.

Lets first start with the features the phone offers. The RIZR is a Quad band GSM phone which would work all around the world with any GSM carrier. The handset is not as thin as Motorola’s recent launches and measures 1.6 cm. It comes with a nice 256k color TFT screen with a 176 x 220 pixel display resolution.

The phone is all set to compete against the slider Samsung phones and the LG Chocolate which is gaining popularity by the minute. The RIZR Z3 has a 2 megapixel camera accompanied by flash capabilities. The camera can take videos too but at very ordinary QCIF quality.

The battery of the phone lasted for only 4 hours as opposed to the 6 and half hours talktime which was on the brochure (we tested it out with a free call ofcourse :p). Other run of the mill features like a MP3/AAC player is pre-installed, with Java MIDP 2.0, T9 dictionary and other tiny features not worth mentioning. The downside for the phone is the missing HTML browser, since the xHTML version is just too outdated for our liking. Also the low 16mb memory is just too little despite the microSD card slot.

The phone is pretty sleek as in the slider is as smooth as any other Samsung phones but is not as light as you think it is. Not surprisingly the phone weighs over 110 grams which is much more than the LG Chocolate for that matter and it certainly feels heavy. The keypad is nice and texture and the buttons are nicely spaced out and easy to hold down.

Update - The RIZR is now available for about Rs. 14,000, to order the 'Motorola MOTO RIZR Z3' in India, email us using the contact us form