MOTO A810 hands on: Spiritual successor to the 2006 Ming A1200

More than two years have passed since Motorola unveiled the Ming A1200. This smartphone came as a huge surprise to the industry because it was Motorola’s out of the box attempt to create a remarkable product – and when we say remarkable, we mean Seth Godin remarkable. They took in a fantastic aesthetic design and merged it with Linux on a mobile phone – something pretty new in 2006. This year, Motorola unveils the spiritual successor to the Motorola Ming A1200; say hello to the MOTO A810.

The new A810 keeps the familiar layout of the previous Ming, but it doesn’t use Linux as its OS. Instead, the developers have created a proprietary Linux-like operating system that upon first glance, isn’t really different from the previous version.

In terms of form factor, the A810 is very different. Although both keep the slate style layout, the A810 doesn’t come with a flip cover. Note that the previous version’s flip cover also housed the antenna which you could see from the transparent casing – an aesthetic beauty! In this case, the MOTO A810 houses an internal antenna. The buttons of the A810 are very minimal with two call buttons and a main menu button at the bottom center of the unit. The side of the unit contains a sort of jog dial / device lock mechanism. In terms of specs, the MOTO A810 comes with the following:

2.2 inch touch screen
2MP camera with video capability
MP3 and FM Radio
WAP Browser
Bluetooth
Up to 2GB of removable memory

I guess the biggest disappointment with the A810 is the lack of today’s standard connectivity options such as HSDPA or WiFi (it does EDGE). Having a smartphone without these capabilities greatly cripples the potential of this device. On the other hand, it seems that Motorola isn’t really pushing this product to be an enterprise solution, but a day to day “cooler than a mobile phone” device.

So yeah, spiritually the same device but made for different purposes, the A810 isn’t the enterprise smartphone it looks to be. The device is attractive and priced more reasonably to make it very much available to the middle market segment.