Click to View

Motorola debuted a smartphone, the A1200, at a Shanghai event in December of last year, when clothing designer Vivienne Tam and some models strutted it and some other new handsets down a runway. The event was meant to set up the phone as a smart device for young and hip business executives in the 25 to 35 year old range. It succeeded. But only after a name change from the generic A1200 to Ming at launch time in February. Ming stands for bright, clear, overt or open in Chinese.

The smartphone, which sells for the equivalent of $475—a huge amount in China, but not out of line for what high-end smartphones go for in that country—is one of the hottest phones on the Chinese mainland. It is also very popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The mobile handset is so sought after, in fact, it accounted for 1 percent of China's entire 110 million cell phone sales last quarter.

The keypad-less device, which weighs a mere 3 ounces (95 grams), is built on MontaVista Linux and a Intel XScale PXA270 processor. It sports a clear flip-cover to allow users to view its 240 x 320 pixel resolution, 262K color and 2.4-inch screen without having to open the phone.

There's also a 2-megapixel camera that incorporates a business card scanner and - even more importantly for Ming's success - excellent Chinese character recognition software for texting; in addition to an FM radio, audio player, and Bluetooth. Productivity software includes a document viewer, POP3 e-mail, calendar, task list, and a contact manager that allows attachment of photos and contact-specific ringtones.

PDAStreet got to handle one at the CTIA trade show in the spring, finding its compactness, design and simplicity attractive; although we didn't get to try any of its software features.

Business Week reports the smartphone, along with the RAZR, C11x and C139, boosted the world's number two handset maker's profile considerably in China this year, helping it increase its overall market share from 12 percent to 21 percent, according to Sino Market Research. Number one Nokia's share stood at 30 percent.

In Ming's domain in particular - smartphones - Motorola controlled 50 percent of the Chinese market, far ahead of Nokia and a reversal of what's true throughout most of the rest of Asia and Europe, where Nokia's grip on the high-end mobile handset market is iron clad for the time being.

"The bright display, the clear flip cover, the high-resolution camera, the superb handwriting recognition, and the features designed to keep the life of an executive clear and comprehensible truly make Ming the unifying concept of this device," asserted Terence Ma, Motorola's Hong Kong Mobile Devices Business director at the time of Ming's launch, in reference to the smartphone's name.

More recently, Motorola CEO & chairman Ed Zander said during the company's Q2 earnings call that the Ming "is the device to be seen with in China."

Motorola is releasing Ming in Southeast Asian markets now, and extending it to South America before the end of the year. There's no official word on European or U.S. deployment. Although a U.S. version of Ming (as the A1200) landed on the mobile device rumor mill's favorite leaky faucet Web site, the FCC, back in January. This GSM/EDGE (850/1800/1900MHz) version of the smartphone appeared to offer a 1.3-megapixel instead of Ming's 2-megapixel camera, but the camera still doubled as a business-card scanner.

Moving on Up with Linux
Because of shipping over a million Linux-based smartphones in China last quarter, mostly due to the Ming (another recent Linux addition was the Rokr E2 music phone), but also because of strong initial demand for the Q, and continued sales of its Symbian/UIQ handsets, Motorola leapfrogged over RIM and Palm to land at number two behind Nokia as a smart device and smartphone vendor for the first time, according to analyst firm Canalys.

Still, to put this achievement in perspective, Nokia commanded 47 percent to Motorola's 8.4 percent of the market, followed by RIM with 6.2 percent, Sharp with 6.1 percent, Palm with 6.0 percent and the rest with 25.5 percent.

Nokia, for example, shipped six times as many smartphones as Motorola, its nearest competitor. And, out of the 18.9 million smart devices sold last quarter, Nokia accounted for 9 million of them to Motorola's 1.6 million, which is not much more than its two nearest competitors.

Symbian still dominates the platform race with 67 percent share, far ahead of second-place finisher Windows Mobile's with 15 percent share. Linux has a long way to go to catch up to these other platforms.

By the end of 2010, The Diffusion Group predicts Symbian will fall behind both Microsoft and Linux, however. In its report the analyst firm said Symbian's share would decline to approximately 22 percent, with Windows Mobile at 29 percent and Linux holding 26 percent. The Diffusion Group lead mobile analyst Lee Allen said, "Symbian will maintain a leading share through 2009, but 2007 will see the beginning of Symbian's decline in share as the combined market penetration of Windows, Linux, and native Java begin to erode developer and vendor support for Symbian."

Linux Clubs
A number of mobile phone vendors are eyeballing Linux and open source as an alternative to established comparatively 'closed' platforms like Symbian and Windows Mobile.

In June, six mobile giants, including Motorola, but also Samsung, NEC and Panasonic, as well as operators Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo announced plans to create an independent foundation to foster the development of an open Linux-software platform for wireless handsets. The goal is to build Linux-based phones cheaper and faster for the manufacturers, and reduce the number of Linux platforms to test and certify from several down to one for carriers.

Motorola, for example, has already shipped over five million Linux-based mobile handsets, and NEC has moved 8 million in Japan, for instance. Samsung, Siemens, and Panasonic all have Linux phones available as well, in addition to several Chinese vendors.

The as-of-yet unnamed organization wants to create a collaborative environment that established safeguards to minimize this Linux fragmentation.

Other recently launched Linux organizations include the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum and the Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI). Both focused on creating standards and specifications rather than a full-on OS.

Yet another Linux standards committee is the CELF (Consumer Electronics Linux Forum).

The closest we've come to what Motorola, Samsung, NEC, Panasonic, Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo would like to do is PalmSource's introduction of its Access Linux Platform (ALP) for smartphones back in February and the unveiling of the Convergent Linux Platform from startup a la Mobile. Both are full-fledged Linux operating systems for mobile devices, but each is independent of the other, which doesn't solve what the group-of-six want to accomplish.