Motorola Ming

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Performance And Battery Life
As its name suggests, the Motorola MING, whose Chinese character means bright, has a well-lit and crisp display that works well indoors as well as outdoors. Used as a viewfinder for the camera, the screen is responsive and sharp for panning shots. Images captured are generally good, except for night pictures which often turn out pixelated.

On average, it takes about 2 seconds to start up the camera which is pretty fast for a smart phone. However, saving an image takes more than 5 seconds and this can be quite a letdown for some hoping to catch the next candid shot.

Some users may find the MING's user interface a little confusing at first, but it is actually quite intuitive once you get the hang of it. The main options can be accessed via the four main icons on the top row of the display for menu, contacts, messaging and phone, with the left corner icon for more options and right corner icon to close the application. Users can also configure the main menu to various user-specific categories.

One of the features we like about the MING is its Chinese handwriting recognition. It is fairly intuitive to use and accurately recognizes a wide range of Chinese characters. For English text input, the handwriting recognition works quite accurately, too, but the conversion from handwriting to text is a little sluggish and the virtual keyboard is a tad too tiny for comfortable typing. So this may not go down well with those who text often.

In our road tests, the MING did well in the areas of reception and voice call quality. Its speaker volume was also sufficient for music playback and for conducting handsfree conversations. The supplied headsets provided acceptable audio quality.

Depending on usage volume, the MING is expected to last about two days before its 850mAh battery needs a recharge. It clocked about 6 hours of talktime during our tests, which was slightly lower than the rated 7 hours given by Motorola.

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