Motorola Q Smartphone

I was pretty excited to hear about a Smartphone that doesn't use up a whole lot of pocket real estate, as I'm not ready to become a cowboy cellphone user sporting a holster. Sadly, the Q doesn't deliver.

Let me start by saying that this products failures come from a combination of the Q itself, Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone Edition, and Verizon Wireless service. I'll try to focus on issues that can be attributed to the phone itself, but a lot of failings probably need to be laid at the feet of Microsoft's Windows Mobile team. My Q is running the latest version of the software available from Motorola.

Let's start with the phone's construction. It's pretty solid, very light, and very thin. It fits all right in your hand, and it doesn't feel like you're holding a massive brick to your ear while you're talking, unlike a Treo. The thumb wheel is decent but hard to use if you have a silicone skin over the phone. The qwerty keyboard is pretty easy to use, and the backlighting is good. The screen is bright and clear, very easy to read. That much is impressive. Remember, this is a smartphone and not a PDA, so the screen is not a touch-screen. This makes web surfing much more difficult, since sometimes it's hard to get out of a text entry box and get over to a "Go" or "Submit" button on some web pages. You have to go through a lot of clicking down, right, up, right, etc. until you land on it.

Now, on to what most people care about: being a phone. The sound quality on this phone is very poor, a definite step down from my RAZR. Bluetooth quality even worse, and it tends to fade up from zero volume anytime someone on the other end tries to speak. The result is that you tend to miss the first couple syllables spoken in any sentence on a fairly regular basis.

The phone application itself isn't very responsive. This is probably some combination of the scaled-down processor required to have the unit be so thin, and Windows Mobile having some questionable design choices when it comes to task management. It often takes a while for the phone to figure out that you're entering numbers and want to start dialing (a couple seconds lag between hitting a button and the main phone screen appearing is common), and there's more delay when you hit Send. Also, if you hit "3", and you have someone's speed dial set to the number 3, their name won't be first on the list of numbers that appears, based on your incoming and outgoing call history. You can usually hold down a button for speed dial, but sometimes this simply just doesn't work.

For data applications, the phone again seems on the slow side. It doesn't help that whenever you start an app, the phone leaves it running until you go into the task manager and manually kill it. You tend to end up with a lot of stuff running. The phone app, the contacts app, your messaging app, Internet Explorer, etc.; over time you will notice degraded performance and need to run the Task Manager to kill all the apps, if you haven't needed to reset the phone.

Outright crashes happen for me about once a week. Random shutdowns happen with about the same frequency. I'll pull the phone from my pocket and find that it's just shut itself off, and need to turn it back on. This is obviously a big problem if someone's trying to get hold of you. I suspect the phone gets confused into thinking the battery is critically low and it shuts itself off, but when I turn it back on it has one or two dots' worth of battery left. Again, this may be a software rather than hardware issue, but the fact remains it's part of the experience.

Battery life is poor, the phone really needs to be charged every night if you do any amount of talking at all or you run the risk of having a dead phone at the end of day two.

The phone's interface for charging and data is a mini-USB connection. I was glad for this, since I had hoped to use my existing Moto RAZR cables and chargers with this phone. The Motorola branded cables do work, but the third party cable I'd bought from GoMadic only worked for USB data connections, but didn't charge the phone. Motorola went out of the way to cripple the unit so you'd have to buy their branded peripherals despite using the common connection type.

I can only recommend this phone to someone for whom form factor is the single most important factor. If you want thin and light, and must have a smartphone, then the Q is a good choice (though I'd look at the Samsung BlackJack from Cingular as well; I played with one briefly and it did seem to perform quite a bit faster). Otherwise, I'd look elsewhere.