NOTE: THIS REVIEW IS NEARLY TWO YEARS OLD. BETTER PHONES HAVE COME OUT IN THE PAST TWO YEARS. This is being left up for archival and informational purposes only.

The Motorola A1200 Ming is a Linux based handheld — handheld, because it’s not really just a phone. It’s a handheld computer that happens to have a phone. It’s Motorola’s customized Linux, and it has a touchscreen interface that changes depending on the application currently in use. I picked it up this summer after my MPX200 got waterlogged. I found the A1200 on ebay for a pretty good deal. As of this writing, it appears to be running 300-350 USD on ebay. Your results will vary.

..:: Feature Summary

Quad Band Cell
Mp3 Player, Video Player
GPRS Wireless Internet
Bluetooth
Personal Information Manager
Business Card Capture
2 Megapixel Still Camera and Video Recorder
FM Radio
Touchscreen Interface
Document Reader
Images: [ google ]
Video: [ youtube ]
Hardware it doesn’t have: WiFi, GPS, Camera Flash

..:: Package Contents

I’ve read many places that Motorola has absolutely no plans to release the A1200 outside of the Asian market, but you can easily find the A1200 on ebay. I also saw a Verizon vendor stand in the mall that had one unit, but none in stock. I advise against getting it from the carriers, because while it will cost less, it will also have many features locked out. Carriers usually lock phones so only SIM cards that they branded will work on the phone. Additionally, many carriers lock features out of the web browser, bluetooth, and media players. So, I bought an unlocked one on ebay, and my package came with:

• the phone: A clamshell with a substantive weight (122 g) but it’s not overbearing. It doesn’t feel cheap at all (a lot of the Samsung and Sony phones do feel cheap). The top half of the clamshell is clear, and the ear speaker is actually in the clear plastic. If you look closely, you can see two wires embedded into the plastic running from the body to the speaker. The screen itself is a touchscreen, and it comes with a thin protective sheet on it. I haven’t had a problem leaving mine on after 5 months now. The dimensions are 95.7 x 51.7 x 21.5 mm, which puts it roughly the size of a RAZR. The unit is available in a lacquered red or white, or a flat black.
• the battery: I don’t really know what the manufacturer’s estimate is on battery life. Those estimates are never accurate anyways as they never reflect normal usage. I typically get 3 or 4 days before I must plug it in to recharge, and I use my phone for many things during the day besides regular call usage (calendar, music, games, studying on the go). I leave Bluetooth off always (because I have nothing to connect it to), and I leave GRPS off when I’m not on the internet. I don’t have a home line either, so this receives all my calls. This is much nicer than the MPX200, which had serious battery life issues (not charging daily meant dead battery).
• a pair of motorola 2.5mm headphones (earbud style): The 2.5mm headphones sound very nice (I’m not an audiophile though). Note that your regular headphones have a typically 3.5mm jack. To use your regular ones, you’ll need a 2.5mm-3.5mm adapter, but then you have the problem with terminals not connecting nicely (you can only plug it in partially or the sound cuts out) and you have a weird flimsy thing sticking out the side of your phone, so I just stick with the motorola headphones. I’ve read that the terminal connection problem doesn’t happen if you get a jack with 3 black rings instead of 2, so if you’re looking around, make sure it has the third ring.
• a usb-4pin cable: This is a standard USB cable that comes with most digital cameras. This is one of the nicest things about motorola smartphones. They charge using a standard 4pin USB port, so you can charge off of your laptop (or PC) as well as any AC wall outlet, and you don’t need to upgrade all of your cables whenever you upgrade a phone.
• 2 stylus: Having the extra stylus is nice, as one is bound to get lost. The stylus does fit nicely into the phone shell, and it sort of clips into place. It does telescope so you can add an extra inch or so to it (~3″ closed, ~4″ open). It is made of some sort of brushed aluminum, and the tip is plastic.
• an AC adapter: This is a regular AC adapter for wall outlets, and it connects to the phone through the 4pin USB port.
• a 128mb USDC: it’s 128 mb of removable storage. It could be larger, but it’s a start.
• a USDC->SD adapter: This is so you can plug the USDC into regular SD slots.
• a manual: As my A1200 is directly imported from China, the manual is in Chinese and English. There is also an A1200i which is an international version of the phone. By default, the A1200i comes with many more language packs installed, particularly for many European languages, but I haven’t seen the A1200i available anywhere.

..:: Operating System and User Interface

The OS is Motorola’s customized version of linux called EZX. It looks very similar to any of the smartphone interfaces, but the A1200 has a touchcreen as its main input. There are two front buttons, and a small 8-way joystick that also pushes in. On the right side are the camera and voice recognition buttons. On the left side are the up/down and select buttons. The select button usually does the same as pushing the joystick in. As these buttons change depending on the mode, I’ll explain the buttons better as I cover the different functions. Youtube has quite a few A1200 Videos showing off the handheld in action.

..:: Windows Compatibility

After using the MPX200 with ActiveSync, the A1200’s sync system (Motorola PhoneTools) for WinXP is rather disappointing. Let me illustrate how ActiveSync is better than PhoneTools.

The bugs and annoyances in PhoneTools are just completely and utterly unacceptable. PhoneTools should be just as transparent as ActiveSync.

When plugged in via USB, WinXP recognizes the A1200 as a mass storage device without needing any drivers installed. WinXP will mount the USDC as the device. In other words, just like plugging in a USB key, you can just plug this in to get instant access to your USDC. You can then just drag and drop files. I haven’t had much luck yet with the bluetooth functions yet.

..:: Linux Compatibility

Ubuntu Edgy automatically recognizes the phone as a microSD slot and you can easily mount the A1200 when connected via USB. Don’t try to mount it with a fs type specified, or you may have to reformat the card like I did (even the phone stopped reading it). Who would think that merely mounting it would bork the partition? Anyways, you would think a Linux smartphone would have better Linux support, but I haven’t yet been able to mount the system memory to sync in Linux, and Evolution with multiSync doesn’t notice it. I haven’t tried connecting via bluetooth as this handheld is the only bluetooth device I have. I’m going to be getting a dongle soon for my PC, so I’ll post my results then.

When plugged in via USB, Ubuntu Edgy recognizes the USDC on the phone as a usbdisk, and will automount the phone. You can then just drag and drop files. I have tried out some bluetooth functions, but it’s pretty nasty. So far, I haven’t found any simple way to transfer files through the bluetooth — and no, hitting scan, then dragging and dropping files left and right, after selecting a phone, and then clicking send is NOT a simple solution. The system should be much more transparent, and I’m working towards a solution.

..:: Mac Compatibility

Currently, I do not have a Mac. I had an old iMac that ran OS8, but it finally bit the dust during Summer 2006 and I disposed of it. I have no intention of looking into A1200 Mac compatibility, so you will have to find that information elsewhere.

Apparently, I have been linked to by a mac user’s forum, and you can find more details on A1200 Mac reviews at philmug.ph.

..:: Phone Calls

The phone is quad band (850/900/1800/1900 mHz), and as long as you get yours unlocked (or unlock it), you can use it all over the planet. The call quality is typical for any quad band phone. The unit will notify you of how many voicemails have been left. Ringtones can be polyphonic (MIDI) or MP3s. A regular MP3 of a few minutes can even be a ringtone.

..:: Bluetooth Compatibility

I personally have tried the H700 headset and I have put my results in my Motorola A1200 Ming and Motorola H700 Bluetooth headset review. The results were quite good, but I don’t like the H700 itself. I’ve read confirmations for the A1200 working well with various headsets: Samsung WEP200, Jabra BT250v, Plantronics 510.

The Bluetooth spec is JSR-82 so supposedly this will work with Bemused. Bemused allows you to use the A1200 as a remote for your desktop PC over Bluetooth. This will be very nice with MythTV. If it does work, but I’ll have to post those results after I get a Bluetooth dongle.

..:: Wireless Internet

Unfortunately, the A1200 does not have Wifi (802.11a/b/g/n). Supposedly, the A1200 does support EDGE, but I haven’t tried, as my understanding is that Cingular doesn’t use EDGE. At the moment, I’m not too happy with any broadband over cell technologies, but that’s for another article. The browser is some sort of customized version of Opera. I haven’t extensively tested javascript and CSS support, but it does seem to support some, and it also supports cookies.

As my phone came from China, all of the default internet connections were for Chinese service providers. Since this phone is pretty fast, the internet on it is tolerable (whereas mMode on my old LG410 was unbearable). It’s not broadband, but it’s acceptable for low bandwidth transmissions. My mobile homepage takes maybe one or two seconds to open, but it’s not littered with images. You’ll probably want to add a GPRS network.

I’ve also read about being able to use a Bluetooth receiver on a computer as a router, but I can’t check how usable this really is until I get the dongle.

..:: FM Radio

This phone does have an internal FM Radio. It does sound very good and the controls are digital. However, you must have the earphones plugged in to use the FM Radio (it will drop out of radio mode if you unplug them), as it uses the wires as an antenna. I never really use this, because I’m typically using the MP3 player.

..:: Camera

The camera has a resolution of 1600×1200 (2 megapixels) which is the highest resolution of most camera phones. Anyone who knows anything about photography knows that digital zoom is worthless, so I leave that off. There is no optical zoom, but there is a macro/landscape focus. The idea is that when you’re photographing anything more than a foot away, use the landscape mode. With macro mode, you can photograph things up close. Macro mode is also used for the business card capture. There is no flash. The pictures are taken in JPG format. The video recording is in 3gP, and is too low resolution to be used for anything outside of viewing on the phone itself. While this is the best camera phone I’ve seen, it’s still not enough to replace a single-task camera entirely, but it is usually a nice feature. I say usually, because most courthouses, and many government buildings do not allow cameras inside, and as a law student, that presents an obvious problem.

Controlling the camera is incredibly simple. Even if the clamshell is closed, just hit the camera button on the left side of the phone to switch to camera mode. Then hit the camera button again to capture a photo. If you left it in video recorder mode, it will capture video instead of stills. You can set it so it saves the images and video to your USDC instead of the phone’s memory.

..:: Business Card Capture

The business card capture uses the camera. Hold the phone a few inches away from the card with the camera on macro mode focused at the card. The card will be digitized using an ocr-text conversion to create a business contact. It’s semi-accurate and expedites the process of inputting information, but it’s not failsafe, and some business cards are just too artsy for it to detect the text well. I typically don’t use it, as I type my contacts into a computer and then sync, because it’s so much faster and has a 100% accuracy.

..:: Media Player

The phone uses RealPlayer and supports most popular formats. My concern was MP3 support, and it does have it. The phone does apparently support forward lock DRM, but a little explanation is in order (as I hate DRM and would never support it). If I have a regular MP3 (downloaded from one of my DJ sites, or ripped myself), I can transfer the MP3 to and from the phone without any problem. The phone doesn’t have some translator that wrecks my non-DRM files. The DRM only applies if the file you’re importing to the phone has DRM. I don’t know all of the details on what commercially supports this, but I did gloss over the DRM section in the developer’s manual. DRM aside, the music portion of the media player easily supports AAC(+), MP3, RealAudio, MIDI, and WAV.

RealPlayer also supports many video formats, particularly MPEG-4, MPEG-3, H.263, 3gP, and RealVideo. However, the issue with simply importing your DivX is that you’ll really want to downsample the video. Most respectable DivX video is 720×480 (or so) while this screen only displays 320×240. This means you’re carrying around a lot of wasted space. I have Acala 3gP converter (WinXP) and it will convert a 700 mb movie (legal of course) to about 75 mb in 3gP. Video is nicely watchable, but it’s a small screen. On the MPX200, the problem with video was that the processor couldn’t handle it displaying that much data, so it would be like watching one frame every few seconds.

There are however, two limitations on your media. The first is your microSD card (USDC) size. The phone comes with a 128 mb USDC, and that fills up incredibly fast. The max size for the USDC is 2gb which is much more respectable, but still limiting. Most phones don’t support anything higher than 2gb and my understanding is that this is a technical issue with the addressing, not some stupid licensing limit. The second limitation is that playlists are capped at 50 files. There are firmware updates available on the web, and there are fixes for this, but they’re not for the Feint of Mind ™. I haven’t yet really had a problem with the second issue, as I still only have a 128 mb USDC.

The media player will not play into mono headsets without the voice recognition hack. The media player works fine in stereo headsets (the included headset is stereo). Also, RealPlayer’s playlisting is rather annoying. It should scan your phone on boot and whenever disconnecting from a computer, but instead, files must be manually added to the library. Listening to music sounds great, and when the clamshell is closed, you can use the buttons on the left side to change the song and the volume.

..:: Voice Recognition

Rather than using pre-recorded voice tags for various callers, the A1200 has a voice recognition system. Unfortunately, it’s not very accurate. Press the VR button on the right side (either the clamshell must be open, or a headset must be connected), and then it asks you for a command or name. I have some 300 contacts, and the only one it picks accurately is my friend Sean (which, amusingly, is a completely non-phonetic name). The VR hack is used to get the media player to play in mono headsets. The VR cannot be used as dictation software (yet anyways).

..:: Additional Included Programs

There is a document viewer that supports GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, PDF, TXT, DOC, XLS, PPT, and HTML. There is also a basic paint program (that can be used to edit your photos), and there is also a note-taking program (a basic text editor). Additionally, there is a world clock with preset city locations, and an alarm that can be used to set two different notification times. There’s also a voice recorder for personal voice notes. The phone came with what appears to be a Chinese-English translator, and also an extreme snowboarding game. The snowboarding game doesn’t compare to Amped on Xbox, or any other snowboarding game for that matter. It’s pretty embarassing, and I never play it. MSN Messenger is also included (not that I’d use it — I personally use gaim for instant messenging and only know a few people on MSN). However, the language defaults to Chinese, and you might want to change the MSN language to English.

You can also visit motorolafans for free A1200 games. I have tried out a bunch of games for the A1200 (from there and other sites), but the problem I see all too often is that most games only support a tiny portion of the screen, as they’re really designed for a different phone and are miscategorized. Another major common problem is lack of touchscreen support. What that translates to is using the joystick, which is horrible for gaming. When looking through many java midlet archives, a lot of programs will still list in A1200 categories when they suffer from both of the above mentioned problems. I have a running list of free A1200 games that support fullscreen and the touchscreen. There are many more games around, but even if they’re ports of great classics like Bobble, Lemmings, Ghosts & Goblins, and Zelda, having shoddy controls makes the game nearly unplayable.

..:: Overall

I personally think this is the best phone on the market. It’s by far the smallest handheld I’ve seen, and most smartphones can’t compare to the feature set. I’ve read much criticism of smartphones and how “Americans want cell phones that only do one thing — make calls”, but that’s rubbish perpetuated by the ignorant and uninformed. Once you have a multi-feature handheld, you absolutely cannot go back. The only features that put the A1200 short of being the One Handheld to Rule Them All ™ are:

• Camera: only 2mpx, no zoom, and no flash. It needs to be 4mpx with at least 4x optical zoom and a flash.
• Media Player: RealPlayer is rather crappy, but Windows Media Mobile on the MPX200 wasn’t any better. Amarok for the cell would be rather nice, but porting KDE wouldn’t exactly be easy.
• GPS: there is none. Some phones (like the Mio A701 GPS Phone) are adding this already.
• Wifi: where is it? Most respectable PDAs come with this now.
• Lockdown: Unfortunately, the phone is locked down pretty well in a development aspect. Getting applications that aren’t java based is incredibly difficult. Hopefully, the new wave of Linux EZX phones will make this better.

..:: Credits

Some of the hardware information comes from the motorolafan A1200 Forums. I made this document after seeing how unorganized all the information is there, and rather than adding my own personal experiences to their mess, I formulated this compendium. Also, their menu system is incredibly broken. developer.motorola.com has more information regarding java development and supported formats for the A1200, but sadly Motorola didn’t really care about me, or US users for that matter. I popped them an email with a few questions, and rather than answering a single one, they just responded that Motorola wouldn’t offer support because they had no plans to release the phone in the US, despite the A1200 that was in a Verizon kiosk in Miami, FL.