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Motorola Ming Review by Yvette Tan

by Jayvee on January 18th, 2007

I recently convinced my new friend Yvette to buy the Motorola Ming and she, with delight, has emailed me a very good feature review of the phone. Take it away Yvette!

I call it fate. I wasn’t supposed to enter the Motorola shop, I wasn’t supposed to pick out a random flyer, and I certainly wasn’t supposed to read it. But I did, and that pretty much sealed everything.

Let me tell you something first. I am a proud owner of a P900. I’ve never had the urge to upgrade it and have always thought of it as the best phone ever, except that it can only hold a maximum of 128 mb. Other than that, my trusty P900 has saved my life on more than one occasion, doubling as a recorder for interviews, camera on trips (despite being generally crappy, it takes publish-quality pictures in strong daylight), a notebook for impromptu notes and ideas, and so on. But despite my P900’s near perfection, there was one thing that it was not — it was not a clamshell.

This was what drew me to the Motoming, aka the Motorola A1200 — its sleek, clamshell design, PDA functions, and the capacity to hold 1gig of memory (not a lot nowadays but still bigger than 128 mb). Before stumbling on the Ming, I was psyching myself into getting the just-released P990, which has everything plus the kitchen sink, but wasn’t a clamshell. After about two months of research and internal debate, I settled on the Ming. This is why:

At first glance, the P990 seems like the superior phone, as seen hehe. But let’s face it, it isn’t as pretty as the Ming. Aside from being considerably smaller, the Ming is light for a PDA phone, weighing in at 122 g to the P990’s 150.

Besides, the Ming pretty much holds its own, coming with essentials (at least for me) like a voice recorder, a 2 mega pixel camera, a jotter, task list, calendar, FM radio, internet connection, e-mail capability, and a fairly engaging game, Extreme Snowboarding. It can text in English and Chinese, and then in both pinyin and zhuyin (phonetics) and in traditional and short-cut (words). Oh, and it can make phone calls, too.

It’s got a card reader, which is about 70% accurate. This means it’ll capture most of the business card you’re copying from, but you’ll still have to key in some information yourself, especially if it’s in English. One of the things that tickles me no end is its voice command capability. Unlike the P900, where you have to individually input voice commands that could then only be used with a headset, the Ming’s commands are automatic, and can be used even when you’re headset-free. I’ve spend many an evening whiling away time telling my phone to do things like turn on the camera and call people with just the sound of my voice. Unfortunately, I have, on more than one occasion, managed to call someone who I wasn’t supposed to. I’m not sure if this is because the technology isn’t perfect or maybe I’m just eating my words.

I’ve had to give up some of the features I’ve gotten used to with the P900, such as the infrared port, the ability to compose Word and Excel documents (you can only view them on the Ming), and the exposure to all those lovely Symbian-compatible applications out there, all mine for the taking, as long as they don’t exceed the phone’s miniscule memory, of course. This is something the Ming, which is one of the few phones that run on Linux, lacks, but I think it’ll catch up in this department soon.

I’ve also had to adjust to texting without a keypad, which was easier than I thought. I’ve managed to do without a stylus most of the time, but that’s probably because I have small fingers. The Ming’s handwriting recognition isn’t as nice as the P9’s though, which, for lack of a better word, sucks. I also don’t like it that when you input something into the calendar, it only gets marked on the first hour, not the whole time your appointment is supposed to last. However, this is offset by the function that automatically posts your upcoming appointment on the phone’s home page.

While you can’t answer the phone while it’s closed, it isn’t completely useless. There’s a lot of stuff you can do with a closed Ming, like turn on the camera and MP3 player, read messages and even answer them with a set of pre-programmed short replies like “Thank you” and, funnily enough, “I love you.”

The phone comes with an earpiece (you can’t listen top the radio without it), a mini USB, and a CD of applications that allows you to transfer information to and from, as well as run your phone from your PC.

In the end, I stopped comparing the Ming to the P9s because, I realized, it isn’t about which is the better phone, but which features you want to prioritize. I wanted a sleek, clamshell phone with PDA capabilities and that’s exactly what I got — and more. I also got the added bonus of owning a phone not many people have, which is cool if you’re into that sort of thing. Incidentally, the “Ming” in the Motoming means “clear” in Chinese. It’s only apt that this little baby helped me clear up what exactly I want (and need) in a phone. Who knows, it might do the same for other areas of my life as well.

Yvette Tan has just given up life as a media mercenary to go into the wonderful, wacky world of business. She is currently trying to program her Ming to clear a path through her messy room. Read more about her (mis)adventures in glossmania.blogspot.com and her online column at www.gmapinoytv.com/karma .

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POSTED IN: Mobile Monitor, Motorola, Smartphone