Motorola to ship first Android 2.0 phone in Korea

Motorola today introduced the first handset to ship in Korea with the Android 2.0 operating system. The MOTOROI smartphone will be sold through SK Telecom in Korea and is a slate-like version of the Droid, including its 3.7-inch touchscreen with a 480x854 resolution. Unlike its current American cousin, though, it has an 8-megapixel camera with a flash and the ability to record 720p HD videos. An HDMI output provides the option of playing those videos back at full quality.

As is commmon, both 3G and Wi-Fi are built-in, and the phone has the whole suite of Google apps out of the box. Koreans get a terrestrial DMB TV tuner that can receiver up to 24 TV and audio channels for free. Built-in memory is set at just 8GB, but a microSDHC slot can house another 32GB.

Users can input text using a keypad, a full- or half-sized virtual QWERTY keyboard or a hand-writing pad. The MOTOROI will read Microsoft and PDF documents, and can recognize written text and save it as a text document using its camera thanks to optical character recognition.

While the handset will ship in Korea early in February, its pricing hasn't been revealed. Most expect a version to ship to North America in the near future.

By Electronista Staff