China gets its first 3G phone - dual-mode Motorola ZN300

Without a word of prior notice or any press announcements, Motorola ZN300 just went live over at Moto website. This new baby flaunts a 3 megapixel fixed focus camera and is quite strangely advertized as a cameraphone. And no, it doesn't have any outstanding video recording capabilities that we don't know about.

Not an overly impressive package, the lower midrange Motorola ZN300 already leaked in January but back then we didn't know it's a dual-mode phone.

If not anything else, Motorola ZN300 at least proves there's nothing RAZR-ish about Motorola anymore.

At 14.7mm thickness, the ZN300 is one chubby boy. It's got a QVGA display, Bluetooth and microSDHC card slot, a standard microUSB port and a standard 3.5mm audio jack. Doesn't sound impressive?

Well actually, the Motorola ZN5 is the first dual-mode phone, supporting both quad-band GSM as well as TD-SCDMA for fast data transfers.

Update 04 March: Motorola have deleted the TD-SCDMA support from the Motorola ZN300 specs page so for now the device seems to simply be an ugly quad-band GSM mid-ranger.

For those of you that are not really into networking terminology we'll put it simply by saying that TD-SCDMA is a Chinese developed standard currently being tested by the biggest Chinese telecom China Mobile as means for providing 3G network access to its subscribers.

China still doesn't have a fully operational 3G network. The two other network carriers in China - China Unicom and China Telecom - are looking to implement the two global 3G standards WCDMA (UMTS) and CDMA-2000 respectively.

Currently, there is no word on expected pricing or availability for the Motorola ZN300.

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