Review: Motorola Ming A1200

As is the case with many Motorola cell phones, the menu’s interface is intuitive, requiring only a couple of steps to access most of the Ming’s features. This cell phone sports a touch screen, so everything you want to do is a just a tap away. The bottom of the screen serves as sort of a task bar with shortcut keys to the most recently used features; the top of the screen doesn’t change. The button in the upper left of the screen with four circles on it provides access to the main menu.

There’s also one-touch access to the phone book, creating messages, and using the phone. Once you master these buttons, understanding the rest of the icons on the cell phone becomes second nature. While you can run multiple applications at once, if you don’t close them and have too many open, there’s little you can do with the cell phone until you close a few.

Entering and saving numbers (there’s room for 4 phone numbers for each contact) is easy. Additionally, you can save birthday info, anniversary dates, a Web address, and a physical address for every contact on your cell phone and dedicate a song stored in memory as a ringtone.
The calls are loud and clear. Using the speakerphone didn’t degrade call quality, and I particularly liked that two people can talk simultaneously when the speakerphone is activated. Since the cell phone’s flip is actually made of plastic, the earpiece doesn’t heat up when you talk on the phone for long periods of time.

The Motorola Ming sports a 2-megapixel camera, and it can record videos. Picture quality isn’t the best. Most images came out pretty blurry. Video quality isn’t much better, but at least you can see what’s happening on the screen. Additionally, if you want to save a lot of photos and music, you’ll need an optional MicroSD card storage card since the cell phone has only 8MB of internal storage, which can fill up quickly depending on what else you have saved on the Ming. You can snap pictures by selecting Capture on the screen in the camera mode or pressing the button located on the side of the cell phone with a camera icon on it. There’s also a tiny mirror underneath the lens on the back of the cell phone for snapping self-portraits.

The good news is that this cell phone offers many tools for enhancing picture quality. There’s brightness, zoom, night mode, and the ability to snap in black and white mode, among others. In addition to the many settings for taking pictures already available on the camera, you can edit images with the included Photo Editor. In this application, you can crop pictures and even add writing or draw circles and lines on photos to point out specific objects in the image. If you’re not a fan of the pics you snap with the integrated camera, you can connect the Motorola Ming to a computer via the included mini-USB-to-USB cable and upload a few of your own favorite images to the cell phone.

There are a couple of ways to listen to music on the Motorola Ming. First, there’s a radio application that you can use to hear local FM stations. While you will need to plug in the headset to use this feature, you can still select the radio to be played over the cell phone’s speakers. The other option for playing back music is in the RealPlayer application, entitled Media on the main menu. Once in this application, you can create playlists and play music, but there isn’t much you can do to adjust audio quality. The good news is that you probably won’t have to since playback of songs is pretty impressive. You can play AAC (Apple’s music file format), WMA (Window’s music file format), and MP3 files. If you plan on storing more than two or three songs on the cell phone, you’ll want to purchase an optional MicroSD card, since the Ming has only 8MB of internal memory, which is simply not enough for more than a few songs.

Playback of songs and music on the FM radio application is decent and loud through the cell phone’s speakers. Additionally, since the speaker is located on the back of the cell phone, you should turn the Ming over to listen to songs.

You can get music onto the phone using the USB-to-mini-USB cable, then drag and drop songs from your computer onto the cell phone. You can also store tunes from your PC on a MicroSD card, then slip it into the MicroSD slot located beneath the battery cover on the back of the Motorola cell phone.

In short, the Motorola Ming just looks cool. It’s definitely one of those cell phones that everyone will want to see or ask about whenever it’s revealed in public. Technologically, there are better devices out there — but in this case, pure coolness tops ‘em all.
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