The Motoluxe is Motorola's latest Android smartphone and it will be available in the UK before the end of the month.

The Motoluxe is a slightly odd beast in that it combines a selection of moderately high end features with some decidedly middle of the road technology, presumably to appeal to a younger audience.

Android 2.3 will be powering the Motoluxe and given that it only has an 800Mhz single core processor, it is unlikely to get an Android 4.0 update at any point in the future.

Motorola will be adding its own custom interface to the Motoluxe and although it has not won as many accolades as something like HTC's Sense or Samsung's TouchWiz, it will surely do a decent enough job of overhauling Android.

The Motoluxe is being marketed as a very slim smartphone, but by contemporary standards, its 9.8 millimetre chassis is not quite in the same league as the iPhone 4S or even the Motorola RAZR.

On the plus side, the four inch touchscreen display actually stretches almost to the edges of the phone's front surface, which means it looks neat and modern on the front. Motorola has been touting the fashionable nature of the Motoluxe, but from the early press shots, it certainly seems to be a bit more functional than visually fetching.

In terms of camera you get an eight megapixel affair with an LED flash, which should be one of its more appealing aspects if Motorola prices the Motoluxe in the middle of the market.

If the Motoluxe was given a little bit of a processor boost then it might look all the more interesting, because even single core 1GHz chips are starting to look a little ropey these days and this handset cannot even reach those heights.

The Motorola Motoluxe is likely to be strutting its stuff at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Spain towards the end of February, at which point far more details will become clear.

The good news, at least from Motorola's point of view, is that Samsung is reportedly pulling out of its MWC 2012 press conference this year.

PC Mag has announced that an email from the South Korean manufacturer stating its intention to cancel the event has been sent out to a number of media insiders.

Without Samsung in the picture, rivals like Motorola will be able to get more column inches for their new smartphones.