Motorola’s MT917, With an Insane 13-Megapixel Camera, Heads to China Mobile

Motorola (NYSE:MMI) announced this afternoon that its newest Droid RAZR, the MT917, is coming to the country’s biggest mobile telco, China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941), in mid-December. It’ll be a boost to the carrier’s struggling Chinese-standard TD-SCDMA 3G network. The most astonishing thing about Motorola’s latest Android-powered flagship is that it has a 13-megapixel camera (pictured above), allowing you to create eye-splittingly sharp pictures which you can then grunge-ify with a photo-filter/sharing app so that it ends up looking like it was taken on a 1970’s instant camera.

The Motorola MT917 that's heading to China Mobile in mid-December. Click to enlarge.

In addition to that 1080p HD camera, the MT917’s screen will be 720p HD, with a 1280 by 720 pixels resolution across its 4.5-inch expanse of Corning Gorilla glass. The front-facing camera is a better-than-usual 1.3-megapixels, for improved video chatting, which will surely look nice when used with, say, Tencent’s (HKG:0700) Weishi app.

A Motorola China representative told Penn-Olson that the MT917’s price has not been announced, and will actually be set by the carrier, China Mobile. For some reason, China’s three mobile telcos never manage to come up with enticing price-tags for their devices, rendering them more expensive than the same phone from a grey-market source, such as smuggled in from Hong Kong. Expect China Mobile to price it well north of 5,000 RMB (US$783) without a contract (as most phones here are bought) when it hits official sales channels next month.

The rear of the phone gets a kevlar fibre panel which gives it that unique effect that’s more like a Formula 1 car’s body than a conventional phone. The standard Droid Razr (MT910) that went to America’s Verizon (NYSE:VZ) network looks similar externally, but has less strong specs.

As with other official Motorola releases in China, it comes with extra, localized features such as the company’s own Shop4Apps store. It’s not clear if China Mobile will add stuff of its own.