Aug 11, 2010 09:26 GMT  ·  By

Mostly known for its presence in China, Motorola's Ming series of handsets was refreshed this week with a new Android-based smartphone, Motorola Ming 1680. This is the first Ming series mobile phone to feature Android OS, all the others running a custom cooked Linux operating system.

Motorola Ming 1680 appeared for the first time on MOTODEV's official website and we hope that it will be also launched outside China.

From the spec sheet showed on the above mentioned webpage we can guess that this is an entry-level Android smartphone.

Ming 1680 smartphone features a transparent clamshell over a 3.1-inch WVGA AMOLED resistive touch screen (480 x 800 pixel resolution) with handwriting recognition function. It also sports a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, high-speed internet via 3G/WAPI/WiFi, GPS location services.

What really puts it on the lower side of the scene is the Android 1.6 and the low powered Marvell PXA935 624 MHz.

Still, besides its interesting design, there are other goodies making the phone desirable, such as: 256 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM, 128 MB internal memory, microSDHC card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB), 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, but also GB15629.11 (WAPI), China's wireless LAN, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR.

Even though the device has been officially announced in China a few months ago, Motorola Ming 1680 is still not available on the market.

Rumors say that the smartphone might be launched by the end of the year and priced at about 1680 Yuan, which is about 190 Euro. Price might be dependant on the location of course.

Let's hope Ming 1680 will not be exclusively available in China, and will also ship on other markets.

If we arose your interest, the guys over 163.com had the chance to play with the device and made a video hands-on, which you can watch it here.