Motorola certainly seems keen to move away from the slim elegance of its RAZR series these days.

The Z10 is a chunky, manly sort of phone that weighs in at a testosterone-affirming 119g. If a sallow-cheeked hoodie fancies his chances and makes a grab for it, you should be able to lay him flat with a swift swing with this.

Wacky design

The follow-up to last year’s video-centred Z8 adds a few additional features and a classier, more business-like design, though it retains the earlier phone’s wacky-looking broken backed case.

The idea behind this is that it brings the microphone ever so slightly closer to the mouth, thus allowing it to work more efficiently and cut out extraneous background noise. In practise of course, no-one really notices this, but everyone notices the look-at-me design.

It feels sturdy enough, despite the slight give at the hinge, so you don’t get the feeling it’s likely to fall apart on you, but despite the obvious engineering effort that’s gone into it, you have to wonder if it’s really worth it.

Frustrating keypad

The screen isn’t huge, but then the iPhone has pretty much redefined the parameters of mobile phone screens.

But at 34x46mm it’s a goodly size, very clear with 16m colours, and at a pinch you could even watch those full-length movies Motorola is offering through the pricey new download service they’ve forged with Paramount pictures.

However, both the numeric keypad and ‘soft’ keys beneath the screen are some of the worst we’ve used for a while. Insensitive and unresponsive, the buttons are awkward to press, require a lot of pressure and the feedback is so minimal you’re not always sure if you’ve actually pressed them.

While there’s an argument that insensitive buttons might be useful on a candybar design, there’s no obvious advantage to having them on a slider and they seriously hamper the use of what could have been a seriously fun phone.

Using Symbian

The Z10 uses the Symbian 9 OS and, like most Symbian models, it never seems to be in a hurry to show you around the menus.

The interface opens with a menu of the most popular apps (messaging, contacts, calendar, profiles, media and the internet via soft key) though there’s a dedicated menu key next to the D-pad which offers a full icon-based menu.

Quality camera

Pride of place on the menu is the camera, which curiously is designed to be used in phone closed position. It’s reasonably quick to get to via the shutter button on the side, but pressing this with the phone open will default to the VGA camera mounted on the front for 3G video calling.

While it’s not clear why Motorola might have chosen this option, the pictures taken with the 3.2 megapixel camera were generally pretty good; sharp and clear with rich colours and a decent sense of perspective.

The fact that you can switch the camera on in a couple of seconds is also a plus for quick snaps. The LED photolight is bright, but subject to the usual limitations – if you ain’t close to your subject, you ain’t getting a well-lit picture.

Like most camphones, video recording isn’t of quite the same quality as stills, but it’s better than some others at this level and playback is fairly smooth at 30 frames per second.