Motorola MOTO Z9 Review

Features and Software:

While the Z9 offers features you’d find with the RAZR2 V9 , such as Bluetooth, media player, microSD slot, it also offers some extra goodie, mainly the GPS navigation and AT&T’s media net that makes use of 3G.



What is media net you ask? Well, it’s a collection of all of the AT&T’s online offerings. This goes beyond just simple web surfing and gives you the option to download games and ringtones, watch videos, check email, listen to and download music, chat, and much more. Shopping, videos, and music have their own links or they can be accessed through the browser.

The Z9 is the first non-Smartphone in AT&T’s lineup to offer Navigator thanks to its built-in aGPS. To those who have used TeleNav before, this is the same software so don’t expect surprises. For the new comers, it’s a very simple GPS to use. The menus are well laid out with each subcategory falling into logical places.

Locations can be search for by city, address, intersection, business address, or by recent searches. If the still does not help, there is another spot to search for it by name. Find yourself in a remote location with no address and want to come back but don’t know how? Simple, just record the location into the navigation. It will show up in your favorites.

On cold boot, it took the handset about 45 seconds to acquire our location. Afterward, it was anywhere between 20-30 seconds depending on the location and signal strength. It’s a great alternative for those out of the blue moments so that your Tom-Tom or Garmin doesn’t have to ride along everywhere with you.



The web browser on the Z9 gets the job done fairly well. Its features include fit to page, full screen, zoom, and page scan. When fit to page is on, all scrolling is done vertically where as with it off, it’s like a regular browser on your desktop. Full screen just takes the status bar at the top and the menus at the bottom off of the page so that the entire display can be used. Zoom in and out do exactly what they sound like.

With page scan, the site can be scrolled across much faster. By default, when scrolling through it, the browser goes by links. Once page scan is turned on, half of the visible page is scrolled through at a time. The only issues we found was that some of the advertisements brought back a proxy server could not be found error and that the fit to screen feature didn’t work at times and it took two or three tries to get it to work. This only happened twice but it was frustrating.


Enough of all the explanations, you’re probably wondering how well pages were displayed. In most cases they render correctly and it is rare that some content overlaps other. Most pages display as expected, as on a computer.