Alex Hopmann’s Blog

Two weeks ago I wrote about the new Motorola Q phone and concluded that it
looked like it hit just the perfect combination of features for my needs.

On Monday my “new every two” discount through Verizon came available and the
phones hit the stores, pretty much on the same day. I called Verizon and they
confirmed that I was eligible for the discount. I asked the woman if she could
check whether any of the local stores had them in stock. She said she couldn’t
check by computer but offered to call all the stores for me and call me back
with the results. I’ve often used this forum to complain about bad service (like
American Airlines) but Verizon won big points this week for one of the best
customer service experiences I’ve witnessed in some time.

As for the phone I first need to include the disclaimer that I’ve had the
phone for less than 24 hours. My typical experience with new high-tech gadgets
is that the first week is great and its only a few weeks later that the
downsides of the device start to be very painful. Having said that so far I’m
very impressed with this phone and the first 24 hours are way better than the
first 24 hours with my old Samsung i630. (Anyone want a free Samsung i630? Just
email.)

The good stuff- My favorite positive surprise is actually the power charger.
It uses the mini-USB connection to charge the phone. So if you plug it into your
laptop, it charges (or at least holds the battery level), and there is only one
connector for docking, power charging, and its a totally standard connector.
I’ve got dozens of different shaped power adapters from old phones and other
devices and switching to a standard shaped connector (and a multi-function one
too!) for the power charger is a major consumer friendly innovation. Thank you
Motorola!

The phone looks and feels good and the call quality is much better than what
I was dealing with before. Its a bit of a pain to hold the phone when talking on
it so I’m investigating ear-bud/headset options. The big issue for me is whether
to go bluetooth for the headset or not. Wireless seems nice but the extra weight
and pain of dealing with batteries in the headset seem less nice.

Using PDANet is great.
I’ll need to try it out a bit more but being able to have roaming Internet on my
laptop anywhere without needing a wifi connection is great. The only issue so
far is that I got a bluescreen once while using it, apparently in the USB
drivers. Probably Dell’s fault, but still annoying.

The scroll-wheel is very good but not perfect. I like it a lot better than
the touch-screen for reading Internet sites and getting through email. Trying to
deal with scroll bars by tapping them on my friends Treo’s (both the PalmOS and
Windows versions) really sucks and the wheel is much better. Still the
ergonomics of the wheel could be better- it feels a bit cheap and I can’t help
but think Apple or Sony would have figured out the physical design somehow so
that it would be much easier to scroll quickly and precisely.

Between the EVDO high-speed network, the scrolll-wheel and the reasonable
screen, using this phone for Internet browsing is a huge improvement. I checked
out Google Local and Bloglines and both were very well suited to this form
factor. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to use this device to keep up on blog-reading
when away from a desk.

Finally the price is just awesome. With a contract and corporate discounts
the phone can be purchased for as little as $150 which is less than half what
the competition costs (the Treo 700 will cost you $300-$400 depending).

The so-so- Overall the phone is faster than my old phone, but not as responsive as a
non-smartphone. It takes forever to startup from a power-off.

The bad- I’m really concerned about scratching the screen. I’ve had
flip-style phones before and when they are closed it protects the screen. I
really need to find some sort of screen-guard but there is nothing off the shelf
yet. Also the key-guard doesn’t appear to have the option to auto-activate on
idle (I suspect this feature exists but I can’t find it yet). Its also very sad
that the feature of using blue-tooth to let your laptop connect to the Internet
is disabled, presumably because the carriers want to sell some extra expensive
service on top of their already expensive internet service for the phone.

Overall so far I think the phone is great. It has just about all the features
you would expect and with the price point its at Motorola is well positioned to
make a big sweep of the smartphone-with-mini-keyboard market for the near
future.

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