Great SMARTPHONE at a great price

Author's Rating:

Pros: Easy to Use, Full Featured, Media Capable Beautiful Screen.

Cons: Limited Doc Handling, Won't do my Taxes.

The Bottom Line: 
I highly recommend the phone if it fits your individual needs. It's got everything at a great price.

Author's Review
OVERVIEW:

I've had this phone for several weeks and love it. I've seen it take a bad rap from Blackberry lovers, Palm fanboys and windows haters. I've used all of them. Let me provide a reality based, unbiased (and hopefully useful) review.

The most important issue I've seen with the brand new Motorola Q is a misunderstanding as to it's purpose. The Q is marketed as a smartphone, not a portable computer or an all inclusive PDA. It is exactly what Motorola says, a very smart phone, not a portable laptop.

That being understood; it has some limitations, but also some great features. It is probably one of the best phones on the market. It's exclusive to Verizon right now and their offering a fairly substantial discount on it, making it several hundred dollars less than any comparable PDA, blackberry or Palm out there.

PHONE:

The phone functions are great. Most importantly it gets good reception, phone calls are crystal clear and it's fairly easy to navigate. The speakers are clear and loud. The speakerphone is very well done. It has 2 speakerer (fairly close together). Several times people have commented on how clear the speakerphone is, while I'm using it.

You can customize the phone as usual with custom pics, custom rings, speed dials, voice recognition etc. My only dissapointment is that the speed dials link to a particular number, not a name. IE; you can't speed dial "Joe" as #2 and then scroll to select which of Joe's numbers you'd like to call. You have to set a speed dial for each of Joe's numbers separately. I personally don't like this setup, but others may not care. I expect that motorola will alter this in a future software update.

Let me address a signal strength issue; some have said it never gets the same signal strength as their other phone. Firstly, it has less bars on the display than many phones. It will only show 4 as a max, not 5 or six. So by default it APPEARS to have less. I've have had no signal issues, dropped call issues or dropped data. Not to say I haven't lost signal in some known dead areas of course, but overall it's connected consistently without fail.

WINDOWS MOBILE 5:

The operating system is windows based and anyone familiar with windows will find it easy to navigate. The scroll wheel on the side and back button make it particularly easy. I have found the OS comfortable and pleasing to work through. It allows some customizing and data manipulation that most other comparable units (ie; palm/blackberry) do not.

For example, with the right knowledge you can easily edit the registry to change default values and setting in nearly every aspect of the phone. Data transfer is amazingly simple (see below). It works very well with other windows programs, Outlook, Windows Media Player 10 and Internet Explorer Portable.

There are some downsides. 1)The phone seems to always leave every opened program running. It's easily fixed by clicking on the task manager and killing any or all of the applications. Some people might not like this, but it's easy and doesn't bother me. Some have said without killing the apps, the phone can slow down. I have yet to see this problem. 2)


DATA/MEDIA/TRANSFER:

This is where this phone shines. Firstly, it has an expansion port for a mini sd card. I've been using a 1Gig card flawlessly. I transferred a huge list of audio files and take my music everywhere, eliminating a need for my mp3 player.

You can download Microsoft's Activesynch 4.2 (free) and it will synch your Outlook and Media with the phone. Specifically, you can synch contacts, email, calendars, tasks and favorites from Outlook to the phone, without buying Verizon's data plan. It will NOT update those items wirelessly without the data plan, but you can synch them and take them with you. It's basic but smooth. If you need detailed customization, then you'd have to buy a separate software (like intellisynch) and use it.

Activesynch will also synch you Media Player 10 library if you want. But what really impressed me? If you hit explore, it opens the phone directory in explorer, just like your computer does and allows you to drag and drop files. I dragged and dropped a bunch of media files, photos, music files and ringtones onto the phone. They were automatically converted and available. I was able to assign the ring tones, play the songs, assign the photos to either the desktop (homepage) or a person in my contacts.

It was effortless and enjoyable. Try loading these items on a blackberry or Palm and see if it's as easy!

EMAIL/WIRELESS SYNCH/TEXT MESSAGE:

I used all of the above. I set the phone up in about 5 minutes to send/receive my personal email. It was easy and worked well. I occasionally got an invalid recipient message when trying to send email, but it was fixed and not terribly difficult, although it was annoying. All in all it worked easily and smoothly, other than that hiccup.

Text messaging is simple with the wide qwerty keyboard. I send audio files and photos with ease as well.

I set up the wireless synch and (with my computer on and connected to the internet), it wirelessy updated my outlook where I was at like it was supposed to. I didn't set it up with MS Exchange Server or Lotus Notes, but it will do it fairly easily and supports both functions. (Don't forget that the wireless, email plans require Verizon's $40 a month data plan, while simply direct synching does not).

WEB BROWSING:

I used the MS Explorer and got on the web. The beautiful screen displayed web pages quite well and navigation was as easy as it can be from a handheld. I played some videos, which were smooth and clear. Overall, the connection was very fast, just as Verizon advertises. I'm not a big fan of internet browsing with my phone, so I didn't use this alot, but checking news, downloading programs or simply playing was easy and fun.

MYTHS/TRUE LIMITATIONS:

1) There have been claims of crashing, restarting, slow menus etc. I have had none of these. Phone works perfectly, menu transitions are fairly quick (although not lightning fast).

2) There have been claims of poor battery life. Mine easily holds a charge for about 2 days. Now, this has a GREAT screen, so if your on the web, emailing and text messaging all day or watching videos, yeah, it's going to drain quickly. In order to avoid this complaint, Motorola is currently offering the extended battery for $19.99 down from $59.99. It will make the very slim phone thicker, but it lasts for several days. So take it for what it's worth.

3) You can view but NOT edit Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc docs on this phone. If you want a touch screen and the ability to edit docs on the fly, this phone is not the one. It won't do it.

4)No it does not have a touchscreen. However, the scroll wheel and accompanying back button make navigation a one handed easy event. I really like how the scroll wheel works and wouldn't want a touch screen, unless I needed to do heavy editing as in 3 above.

5) There have been many miscellaneous claims of the phone being unable to do numerous minor tasks. I'd be cautions believing them. Most of the ones I read about online turned out to be user error. For example, one said that they couldn't answer the phone while reading email or text messages. Not true, it interrupts you and all you have to do is hit send. The media player actually pauses mid video while you talk and then begins again when your finished.

Another one; there is no battery true battery monitor. Not so, in addition to the BAR graph on the front page, if you go to setting, power management there is a solid bar graph that very accurately shows the battery life. The phone also alerts you when it's fully charged or beginning to fail. So take it with a grain of salt.

6) I'd remember as well, that this phone is fairly new. In all likelihood, Motorola will be updating the software/firmware to fix the minor bugs/glitches that accompany all new phones.

UNIQUENESS:

Here are a few thing to consider about why this phone is truly unique or purchase worthy;

1)Everything is done via USB cable. So, it charges and synchs while plugged into your computer through the 1 USB cable. No second cord running to an AC outlet. Palm usually requires both. Even the Q's cradle charges, synchs and charges a backup battery with just the USB cable.

2) As described above, transferring media with Active synch is the simplest, easiest user interface I've seen in a while.

3) The camera has decent quality, with 1.3 megapixels and a flash. It is also fairly customizable for a cameraphone. If you want to take pictures.

4)You can use most of the features (minus web, email etc) without subscribing to Verizon's data plan. Or without keeping it if you subscribed in order to get the $100 rebate.

5)It has a great screen. It's designed landscape and has beautiful pixel quality. Photos and movies are incredibly bright and clear. It's the best screen I've seen on a phone.

These are the basics. If you have additional questions, leave me a comment and I'll respond.

Overall, It's a great phone, with a great feature set, easy to use, a pleasure to view and almost smaller than a deck of cards.