ĥ! √lţĝē: Moto ming works on linux?

The Linux-based A1200 mobile phone (a.k.a the “MOTOMING”) from Motorola is a clamshell unit solidly constructed around a minimalist design. The phone is compact but feels just heavy enough to be taken serious. The black (actually “Licorice”) rubberized body sports chrome-finish detailing along the sides and front panel. The design feature that stands out is a smoky, transparent flip with thin embedded wires leading to the tiny speaker you place against your ear.

The flip is anything but flimsy, but to open this clamshell, you need to employ your fingernails as a shucking knife on one of the two shallow dents on either side of the casing left there to aid opening, but not by much. You will also need fingernails to pull out the plugs that keep the earphone and mini-USB jacks dust-free.

The lens for the 2.0 megapixel camera comes with a tiny flip switch to choose between normal and macro mode. It does a good enough job of taking snapshots and can do so with the camera closed, at which point the whole screen becomes a viewfinder which you can see through the transparent flip.

The zoom is purely digital, so you won’t call on it often unless you’re going for that pixelated look. The zoom operates in 6 distinct steps from 1.0x to 8.0x. To store your images and other data, the phone uses a tiny microSD card for memory expansion.

One of the more interesting uses of the camera is found in the phone’s Business Card Scanner function. You simply slide the selector switch on the camera lens to the macro mode, line up a red rectangle with the edges of your card. If you do it right, it will turn green and automatically snap a picture after a three-second countdown. The Optical Character Recognition function then kicks in and populates your address book entry with the information.

Expect to have to make some corrections before you save the entry. Sometimes the company name is entered as the person’s name and bracketed country codes are copied wholesale. Email addresses, on the other hand, are usually recognized flawlessly.

The phone comes with a telescoping stylus for use with the bright, clear touchscreen, which doubles up as a virtual numeric keypad for normal phone functions, with keys generously spaced. As you can imagine, keeping the screen and clear plastic flip free of fingerprints takes commitment. Voice quality is excellent and volumes of the polyphonic ringtones can be set loud enough to annoy people on the far side of the room. The external buttons all give a responsive click when pressed and the tiny chrome joystick is also quite usable.

What is less usable, on some occasions, is the interface. Opening the main menu displays nine icons at any one time, on a 3×3 grid. If the icon on the lower left is selected and you pushed the joystick up, you would expect the mid left icon to be selected. But no, the mid right icon is selected instead. So to reach the top left icon, the joystick cycles through six icons instead of the expected two. In this situation, forget the joystick.

Another peculiarity is found in the ringtone/vibrate profiles accessible via the external volume buttons. You would expect that all the profile choices involving ringtones would apply to the one ringtone you chose when setting up the phone. Instead you have to set each of the five ring profiles to that one ringtone you want because they all default to different ringtones. It’s an annoyance you can work around once and forget about, unless you change your ringtone often.

You might wonder if a phone based on Linux works properly with a Windows PC. The answer, surprisingly, is yes. But it pays to have a broadband connection set up on the machine when installing the drivers because the process involves downloading around 16MB worth of updates. It comes with “phone tools” software that allows you to sync your data and address list with a PC, as well as drag and drop media files between the two. It can view Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF files but there is no way to edit them. The screen is definitely too small to read any normal-sized font even when maximized to the full width and rotated into landscape mode. You will have to tap and drag the document around to read it.

As with most smart phones, if you open a few applications in succession, the latest application takes over the whole screen. If you forget that you have opened five applications beneath the top one, you’ll be wondering where all your memory went. The phone automatically goes into key lock mode after a few seconds of inactivity when you close the flip. To unlock the phone in the closed position, you have to tap any of the external buttons twice in quick succession.

You have several choices when it comes to text input, which we found to be one of the phone’s strongest features. Handwriting recognition in English is easy and accurate and the strokes appear on the screen as you write. You can write either in upper or lower case, and you can alternate between right and left frames of the input area to speed up your input. But using Graffiti-style writing popularised by Palm devices will lead to errors. There is also a punctuation corner in the right frame. Importantly, backspace and shift buttons are shown even in handwriting mode.

The same goes for Chinese input as well, both traditional and simplified forms. The recognition for written characters is very high, even with purposely poor attempts at writing Chinese characters. Personally I found it quickest to use the on-screen keyboard, which comes with a pinyin and zhuyin version. The pinyin keyboard pops up the next likely letter to make selection even easier. You can use the stylus to peck at the keys but a fingernail will do just as well.

With moderate use of PDA functions, half a dozen calls and some SMSs, the 3.7-volt lithium-ion battery went from full charge to low battery warning just under 24 hours, so keep that charger handy. Both the charger and the data cable use the same mini-USB port on the side of the phone and you can charge the phone from a computer’s USB port. If you are already a Linux user, you are probably used to glossing over a few inconveniences the rest of the world takes for granted. In this sense, the phone lives up to its Linux heritage. If you can put up with the minor inconveniences mentioned above, and use some simply workarounds, this Bluetooth and GPRS-capable phone may just grow on you.

- smbedge

General	Network	GSM 850 / GSM 900 / GSM 1800 / GSM 1900
	Announced	2005, December
	Status	Available

Size	Dimensions	95.7 x 51.7 x 21.5 mm
Size	Weight	122 g

Display	Type	TFT touchscreen, 256K colors
	Size	240 x 320 pixels, 36 x 48 mm
		- Handwriting and speech recognition (Chi & Eng)

Ringtones	Type	Polyphonic (40 channels), MP3
	Customization	Download
	Vibration	Yes

Memory	Phonebook	Yes
	Call records	Yes
	Card slot	microSD (TransFlash), buy memory
		- 8 MB built-in memory - Intel XScale 312MHz processor

Data	GPRS	Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
	HSCSD	No
	EDGE	No
	3G	No
	WLAN	No
	Bluetooth	Yes
	Infrared port	No
	USB	Yes, miniUSB

Features	OS	Linux
	Messaging	SMS, EMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
	Browser	WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML
	Games	Extreme Air Snowboarding
	Colors	Black, Red, Silver
	Camera	2 MP, 1600×1200 pixels, video
		- Java MIDP 2.0 - Stereo FM radio - MP3/MP4/AAC+ player - PIM functions - Document viewer - Voice dial/memo - Built-in handsfree