Motorola Moto Z9

The Motorola Moto Z9 is a fine example of a powerful feature phone with a wide range of capabilities, and it should especially please people looking for a good voice phone. Since it does everything the RAZR V9 does and costs less, it’s our new Editors’ Choice feature phone for AT&T. But here’s the denouement: The Motorola Moto Z9 comes from a struggling phone company that needs some genuine new ideas to liven up sales. It may be a solid handset, but it’s not the fresh, new thing that Motorola needs in order to reclaim market share and regain its position as a top mobile phone maker.

With Motorola Moto Z9 you can play music and video files that you drop onto a microSD card or sync from Windows Media Player. AAC, MP3, and WMA files all played well, except for files downloaded from iTunes or iTunes Plus. (iTunes Plus files don’t have copy protection, but they still give some players, including this one, problems.) On our tests, a 3GP-format video looked good in full-screen mode, as did AT&T’s streaming Cellular Video service. But an MPEG-4–formatted video from a PC had lip-sync problems.