It’s the Q, the Motorola Q. The RAZR-thin Motorola Q is the coolest smartphone in America. It’s a terrific voice phone, a dandy music player, and a swell e-mail machine. Just be warned: Expensive service plans mean it isn’t as cheap as it appears.

The Q is an unusually wide (2.5 inches), very flat (0.5 inches thick) 4-ounce slab with a bright 320-by-240 screen and a raised, angled QWERTY keyboard. There’s a scroll wheel and button on the side, just like those on BlackBerry devices, and a five-way cursor pad above the keyboard, like the ones on Palm Treo handhelds. You can use both sets of keys for navigation, making the Q unusually convenient to use with one hand. A miniSD card slot sits on the edge opposite from the scroll wheel.

For voice quality, the Q is the best Verizon smartphone I’ve tested. Its reception comes close to the excellent RAZR V3c and Motorola E815. Sound through the earpiece, speakerphone, and Bluetooth headsets is unusually loud and clear; transmission is nearly flawless. VoiceSignal’s voice-dialing application, which works over Bluetooth headsets, is terrific. This is an excellent phone, plain and simple. Battery life, at 5 hours 25 minutes of continuous talk time, is good, on a par with that of the Palm Treo 700p.

The Q is also a great music player, thanks to its support for Bluetooth stereo. As a Windows Mobile Smartphone, the Q plays MP3, WMA, and protected WMA files downloaded from Microsoft-compatible music stores such as Yahoo! Music and Rhapsody. I hooked up three stereo Bluetooth headsets—Motorola’s own BT820, the Wi-Gear iMuffs, and the Plantronics Pulsar 590A—and listened to music while surfing the Web on Pocket Internet Explorer without trouble, though the multitasking did make scrolling slightly jerky. Downloading e-mail in the background while listening to music was too much for the Q—it caused the music to skip. When I got a call, the music paused, then resumed from where I left off when the call was over. The fast-forward and rewind buttons on the headset also worked.

Video is another story. I couldn’t get videos transferred through Windows Media Player 10 or downloaded directly onto an SD card to play without the device stuttering. That’s odd because the Q actually was faster on our video benchmark tests than the T-Mobile SDA and MDA, both of which can play video smoothly in a small window. When I discussed this with a Motorola rep, we both suspected that my unit might have had a video-related software bug.

The video bug and Windows Mobile 5.0’s generally ponderous operation (compared with that of the less resource-intensive Palm OS) may also explain why the Q got much slower video frame rates than the Palm Treo 700p, which uses the same 312-MHz Intel Bulverde processor and has a 50 percent larger screen. But I’d expect the Q to feel more responsive than the T-Mobile SDA, the T-Mobile MDA, the Cingular 2125 and the Cingular 8125, all of which use a 195-MHz Samsung processor.

The basic POP3/IMAP e-mail client on the Q, which supports up to eight accounts, works well. Verizon also provides its Wireless Sync push e-mail solution, which I’ve always found clumsy, and support for Good’s GoodLink push e-mail system. E-mail and Web pages download swiftly over Verizon Wireless’s BroadbandAccess EV-DO network. I got speeds averaging 500 Kbps on bandwidth-test sites.

To read attachments, the Q comes with the Picsel Viewer application, which is excellent at displaying even complex Microsoft Office documents and PDFs. You can’t edit the documents, though. There’s plenty of room for additional programs in the Q’s 49MB of built-in storage.

The Q’s 1.3-megapixel camera takes decent photos. There was a bit of purple fringing in bright shots but nothing too awful. The interface takes some getting used to—though there’s very little shutter delay, the phone freezes for up to a second after you take a shot. The camcorder mode takes relatively smooth 176-by-144 videos at 10 frames per second.

The Q is missing a few features power users will look for. Wi-Fi could come through the miniSD card slot in the future, according to Motorola and Verizon. Push e-mail from Microsoft Exchange servers will come in an update later this year. You’ll also be able to use the Q as a modem for your laptop later this year, at a $15-per-month premium to your service plan.

Besides the stuttering video, I also ran into other occasional bugs, which is not surprising on a Windows Mobile machine. Quitting The Core Pocket Media Player crashed the device. And sometimes it took two or three tries for the Q to recognize a memory card.

Verizon wants to sell the Q to ordinary consumers, but its costly smartphone service plans stand in the way of the Q sweeping America. You get 450 minutes for $79 per month, 1,350 minutes for $109, and 4,000 minutes for $169, with unlimited data and in-network calling during nights and weekends. Unlimited Q data can also be a $40 add-on to an existing family plan, so, for instance, a 700-minute, two-line plan with a Q and a voice phone would cost $110 per month. At Sprint, the equivalent of Verizon’s $109 plan costs only $75, and Verizon’s $110 family plan would cost a mere $85. Verizon needs to bring its monthly fees down if it wants the Q to be the success it could be.

The Q’s major competitors are from Palm—the Treo 700w and the newer Treo 700p. The 700w is more expensive than the Q and has little to recommend it. The 700p comes with Microsoft Office document editors (not just viewers), has a higher-res screen, runs on both Verizon and Sprint, and is both faster and less buggy than the Q. On the other hand, it costs $200 more and is considerably chubbier. So while the 700p retains the Editors’ Choice crown, the Q is an excellent machine and a terrific choice.

Compare the Q with several other mobile phones, side by side.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 25 minutes

Video
Watch the Motorola Q Video Review!

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