The Motorola RIZR Z9 isn't a bad choice for a phone, it just isn't a very exciting choice, either. Call quality was very good, and it has all our favorite calling features, including a robust address book and speaker-independent voice dialing. Music, too, was a solid feature, with plenty of options. But none of it was especially appealing or easy to use, so the phone simply fell flat. We'd like to see just a bit more polish all around. A thinner shell, a slicker interface, better Web browsing. Everything on this phone comes so close, but doesn't quite deliver all it could. It does a lot right, but not a lot great. Release: April 2008. Price: $150.

Pros: Nice paint job. Great call quality. Solid build. Navigation tracked us well.

Cons: Not very exciting or elegant, especially for a slider. Keypad wasn't great. Web browser disappointing, especially for Opera.

We would love to call the Z9 an innovative, new cell phone, but that wouldn’t be quite right. Unfortunately for Motorola, the company is still stuck in its past and can’t let go of its RAZR days of success. A single concept and its rehashes won’t win over the crowd every time, and Motorola is experiencing the backlash in its earnings, a decline in market share and annoyed customer base who would prefer the company to wow them again.

Motorola’s Z9 is a slider phone with a mahogany exterior, which is a nice color to differentiate the Z9 from the rest. The external controls continue to be standard with a volume rocker and music shortcut on the left spine, and a camera shutter and a microUSB port on the right spine. The front packs a gorgeous 2.4-inch display with 262k color support, a crispness that’s required to view today’s digital content, including videos, photos and text. We had a blast navigating through the menu just because the display was so vibrant and exciting to use. Of course similar to a lot of smartphones, you can adjust the brightness and backlighting time to conserve battery, and trust us, with the display this bright, you are almost certainly going to have to work on reducing the brightness.

Going back to the navigation menu, do note that Motorola hasn’t updated its menu at all. It’s the same old way of browsing through your phone. We’re not pleased; half of the fun of getting a new phone is to take advantage of new features, and the Z9 is lackluster in that category.