The Motorola MOTORIZR Z8 is one of the most striking phones released this year. Built to impress, it presents a state-of-the-art feature set in a design that no other manufacturer has tried before.

Essentially this is a slider phone with a twist. As you open the Z8 up, the phone bends in the middle - cradling that much closer to the lines of your face as you make calls. The mechanism is ingenious and attention grabbing, and it also seems eminently robust.

The so-called "banana-phone" approach is not entirely new, as some may remember with the curved Nokia 8110, which caused a similar design stir back in 1996. However, Motorola has introduced something far more sophisticated.

Features

Rather than using the etched-metal detailing of the RAZR, Motorola has instead gone for a brash combination of black plastic in the casing. A range of different plastic finishes are used, but the finishing touch is the yellow detailing that is used for the phone's accents.

A lemon-coloured stripe is positioned between the two halves of the slider, and the same bright colour is used for the rear hinge, keypad numerals, and joypad.

There is no debating this is an impressive top-of-the-range phone. It's built on the Symbian 9.2 UIQ 3.1 operating system, although it doesn't use the full touchscreen version of the OS adopted by Sony Ericsson's UIQ handsets.

The Z8 is a turbocharged 3G handset that can harness the extra download and surfing speed provided by HSDPA technology. There's a 2-megapixel camera with flash, and the Z8 has a sumptuous16-million colour 2.2-inch screen. But the real talent of this phone is multimedia....

Multimedia

The MOTORIZR Z8 hasn't just been designed to help you enjoy music, movies and downloaded video clips - lots of phones already do this. Thanks to clever marketing by Motorola this phone has been set up to show you the phone's talents from out of the box.

The Z8 has been launched in a special Movie Edition pack (with O2 and Vodafone contract tariffs). This throws in a sharp-looking Bluetooth stereo headset, plus a 512MB memory card that provides a full version of the action blockbuster The Bourne Identity.

The Matt Damon movie is a great bit of marketing. Being able to get "DVD quality" movies on memory cards is nothing new; they have been available for several years for certain compatible smartphones. But at £15-£25 a pop they have never become popular.

This phone provides the necessary software to show the technology, as well as a popular movie. It is a great foil for the superb processing and screen characteristics of the Z8.

The really clever stroke, however, is the headset. We have been banging on about stereo Bluetooth headsets for a long while now as being the perfect add-on for your multimedia phone, allowing you to listen to MP3 tracks and video downloads in full stereo, without the need for wires.

With the Z8, Motorola's S9 Bluetooth headset comes as standard. It looks smart, and gives great performance, and has its own rechargeable battery (which like the phone itself can be topped up by connecting to a USB port of your computer, if you don't have the mains charger to hand).

Although this is billed as an entertainment phone, what Motorola deliberately fail to big up is that the Z8 is actually a fully-fledged smartphone, and a rather interesting one at that. The R&D team beind the phone includes a number of key ex-Sendo staff, that were snapped up by Moto along with Sendo's patents when Sendo went under in 2005.