The Motorola MOTORIZR Z6tv for Verizon is an excellent voice phone with a little something extra: eight channels of major network television. The third phone with Verizon's TV service, it's the first with an internal antenna. The previous television phones, the Samsung SCH-U620 and the LG VX9400 had giant, pop-out TV antennas. There's a reason, too: the Z6tv has less luck in pulling in a TV signal than the U620 with its 3-inch prong. The VX9400, with a 5-inch rabbit ear, has even better reception. But you don't even need to subscribe to Verizon's TV service to like this phone's long battery life, attractive shape, and pleasant voice quality.

When the signal is strong enough, Verizon's $13- to $15-per-month TV service is the best of its kind. V CAST TV shows eight channels of popular programming, at full frame rates, in full screen, playing audio through the phone's speaker or a wired headset. The channels are mashups of CBS, FOX, NBC, Comedy Central, ESPN, MTV, and Nickelodeon programming—not live feeds of what's broadcasting at the moment, but rather a "best-of" format that makes smart choices, like moving late-night talk shows into the prime morning commuting hours.

The phone itself is a smooth, rectangular slider, with a nice little plastic bar at the bottom of the screen to let you slide the body up and reveal the keypad. The keys are small, but they sport raised rubber guides to prevent misdialing. The smallish, 2-inch, 320-by-240-pixel screen is bright, and there's a flashless 2-megapixel camera on the back. All in all, the Z6tv has a classy, yet reserved look—less flashy than the metallic Motorola RAZR² V9m.

The Z6tv's phone performance is very good. Reception was up to the stellar levels of the Motorola V9m and E815. Volume was average and acceptable on both the earpiece and speakerphone, if not tremendously loud. There's a lot of in-ear feedback to prevent "cell yell." Background noise isn't too much of a problem, but wind definitely caused volume fluctuations during phone calls. The vibrate function is powerful.

I connected the Z6tv to Motorola mono and Plantronics stereo Bluetooth headsets easily, without even having to type a pairing code. There are dedicated buttons to activate both the speakerphone and the excellent Nuance VoiceSignal voice dialing, and you can also voice-dial over Bluetooth. Battery life is spectacular, at nearly 6 hours of talk time, thanks in part to the handset's small screen.

The phone's refreshingly uncrippled Bluetooth functionality also allows file transfers and modem use via Bluetooth, though we always recommend a USB cable for modem use with high-speed phones. Reports on HowardForums, a phone fan site, say that Apple's iSync can be hacked to sync with this phone via Bluetooth, but that function isn't officially supported.

There's one Bluetooth hitch, though, which happens when using the Z6tv as a music player. Music heard through a wired headset sounds clear and true, and a great little hardware lock switch prevents you from jostling your way to the next track. But Bluetooth headphones disconnect and reconnect after every track, losing the first fraction of a second of every track. Otherwise, the Z6tv works well with Windows Media Player, syncing both protected and unprotected MP3 and WMA music tracks. You can store music and other data in the phone's 50MB of internal memory or on a microSD card. A 4GB Kingston card worked fine.

Taking pictures is the usual so-so camera-phone experience. It's quick to shoot, but the pictures themselves are relatively low-res for a 2-megapixel camera (at only 700 lines of resolution), with reddish, highly saturated colors. I saw some serious fringing and color noise on outdoor shots, with the pictures' darker areas underexposed; on low-light shots color noise was a problem again, with bright areas overexposed. The video mode shoots relatively acceptable 320-by-240 videos at 14 frames per second. It's easy to get photos off your phone by using either a memory card or Bluetooth.

The Z6tv's built-in GPS worked unusually well with Verizon's VZ Navigator service, announcing directions loudly and grabbing a GPS lock even inside our offices. Performance on V CAST games wasn't spectacular, but fine for casual gaming. An e-mail client, which supports AOL, Windows Live, Yahoo! Mail, and POP3/IMAP e-mail costs $5 per month extra. There's an integrated IM client, but you'll be charged for instant messages as if they were text messages.

The Motorola Z6tv compares well to other mid- to high-range Verizon phones. It's more capable overall than the LG Chocolate VX8550, and voice quality is better than that of the LG VX8700. The Samsung SCH-U620 is still our top pick for mobile TV use, as it's smaller, less expensive, and gets better TV reception than the Z6tv. But the Z6tv is a strong player, especially because of its excellent voice performance and all-around build quality.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 53 minutes

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