Motorola Ming

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The MING is a quadband phone, much like its Razr cousins, so it can be used to roam in most parts of the world, including Europe, the US and Asia. The lack of 3G connectivity, however, means that travelers heading to places such as Korea and Japan will not be able to use the handset in those countries.

To connect to a PC for data file transfer, users have a choice between Bluetooth, USB and the memory card (via an optional memory card reader). To make up for the measly 8MB of onboard memory, Motorola has included a microSD slot on the MING. This supports media capacities of up to 1GB capacity, which should be sufficient for most mobile productivity and entertainment needs. The Bluetooth profile also supports A2DP, meaning you can pair the MING with wireless stereo Bluetooth headsets.

The onboard 2-megapixel CMOS camera captures images at a maximum resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 pixels, which is theoretically good for printing 8R photos. You also get a basic set of camera controls such as white balance, filter effects and night mode. There's even a small switch above the lens for macro shots. However, since there's no LED flash light on the device, you can pretty much rule out shooting in low-light conditions. The camera doubles as a videocam, though the low 176 x 144-pixel resolution will limit it to mainly candid clips.

Interestingly, there's another useful application for the digital camera--as a business card reader. It works the same way as commercial name card scanners, except that you use the camera to take a picture of the card instead of scanning it. This application worked well for new business cards with large and clearly labeled fonts. But when we tried to feed in those with odd designs or even slightly crumpled ones, the MING failed to recognize the card on several occasions. Having said that, it's still a great tool to have on the smart phone, especially for mobile professionals who need to keep their contacts updated.

Perhaps due to the processor-intensive scanning and optical character recognition process, the business card reader application seems to use up quite a bit of resource when in operation. It is therefore advisable to close other running applications before using the reader.

For music and video entertainment, the MING comes preinstalled with RealPlayer application. There's also a Photo Editor software which doubles as a fun doodle board and a voice recorder that's useful for taking notes. The smart phone itself can be used as a modem, either through USB or Bluetooth. It has an FM tuner which, like most phones, requires the earphone to be connected before the function can be used.

As an organizer, the MING offers a standard suite of PIM offerings including world time, task manager, alarm clock, notepad and calculator. Other applications include an email client, Web browser and a file manager. You can download more third-party Linux software utilities from the Internet, though they are somehow not as readily available as those for the Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile platforms.