The Moto Q marks Motorola’s entry into the highly-competitive PDA cell phone market. The company has earlier tried getting into this market via their A series of phones (Moto Ming), but failed to garner any footing. For the Moto Q, Motorola has gone with the tried-and-tested design for a QWERTY phone. It is wide but well proportioned,and therefore feels much better to hold when compared with Nokia’s E61/61i. Lessons learnt from the RAZR have been used to good effect on the Moto Q; the phone is slim for a PDA phone. Finished in jet black, the exterior has arubberised feel, and the body offers excellent grip. Except for the navigational D-pad, all the buttons are flat and at times difficult to press. The QWERTY keypad offers excellent tactile feedback and equals that of those on high-end PDAs such as those from Blackberry and Palm. The 320 x 240, 2.4-inch, 65K colour screen seems dated; the Nokia E61 has had a 16 million colour screen for a long time. The Moto Q has an anaemic 40 MB of internal memory, which can be augmented via the bundled 1 GB mini SD card. The Moto Q runs on Windows Mobile 6, and the user interface is zippy. By default, the Moto Q uses Motorola’s theme, but we prefer the Windows theme. The Today screen can be customized to show events such as meetings and birthdays, as well as e-mails and text messages. The “Documents To Go” application comes preinstalled, and it’s great; it ably handles Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and ZIP files. A default Windows file manager helps browsing the device effectively. System tools include a memory manager and a task manager. (The task manager is useful for when you need to know about background processes and kill them.) Multimedia features are mediocre; Windows Media Player can be used for MP3s and video. The 1.3MP camera is strictly okay; the photographs are passable, and video capture is jerky. Connectivity options include USB, Bluetooth, IR, GPRS, and EDGE. Motorola has been generous with the bundle: a portable adapter, a good-quality leather pouch, a headset, the USB cable, the 1 GB miniSD card, and two batteries. The higher-capacity batter is fatter and requires a different battery cover, which also comes bundled.

The MOTO SLVR line features typical, nononsense, slim candy-bar phones with a reasonable amount of features. The SLVR L9 is the successor of the L7; in the looks department, the two are nearly identical. Despite it being entry-level, the fit and finish of the L9 are surprisingly good. The pearl-grey finish is as good as that on the more expensive RAZR 2.

The back cover is finished in rubberised material, and therefore offers good grip. A 2-inch, 256 colour, 176 x 220 LCD is more than enough for this phone. The screen is sharp and bright, and stays perfectly legible outdoors. The navigational keys consists of a roundel and two soft menu keys. There are two additional buttons (for Cancel and

launching FM). The keypad is well-spaced, with each key being separated from the other by small ridges; however, the tactile feedback isn’t as good as that on the new RAZR 2, despite the visual similarities. One of the prominent differences with respect to the older L7 is the fact that the memory slot is on the right.The L9 accepts microSD up to 2 GB (the phone has just 20 MB of internal memory). With many phones supporting up to 4 GB of additional memory, this is a bit of a disappointment. The user interface on the L9 hasn’t been upgraded to the newer MOTOMAGX-it uses the older, not-so-polished UI. Well, we should say it is easy to work with, but visuallyspeaking, Symbian’s revised Series 40 is more intuitive. Coming to multimedia, the SLVR L9 supports the MP3, AAC, AAC+ and MPEG4 formats.

The media player is mediocre compared to that on the RAZR, and indeed, that of any music phone today. Audio quality is reasonably good. The 2-megapixel camera is pretty much similar to that on the RAZR 2. The camera performs admirably outdoors; in low-light conditions and indoor environments, photos turn out dark. It’s also capable of recording video in the MPEG4 format, but the quality is nothing to write home about. We had no problems as far as signal reception goes, but the speakerphone clarity could have been better. Battery life is strictly okay.we got around two days with nominal usage.

With the release of the MOTO RAZR 2 V8, Motorola has yet again raised the bar for stylish cell phones. In fact, just “stylish” doesn’t do it justice-it’s stunning! In its second iteration, the body of the MOTO RAZR is built from exquisitematerials; it comes with two large screens, a revamped keypad, and a great music player. The RAZR 2 feels slimmer than the original RAZR, thanks to a less pronounced chin.

The 2.2- inch LCD on the flap is the first of its kind on any phone-it’s sharp, and the clarity is amazing. Near the bottom of this screen are touch-sensitive electrostatic keys. All the keys on the new RAZR, including the touch-keys, vibrate when pressed-this, we think, is good in terms of hapticfeedback. The interiors of the V8 are pretty similar to those of the original RAZR except for the keypad layout and the overall feel. The main display is similar to the one on the flap-2.2-inch, 256K colours.

The display is sharp and completely legible outdoors. The keypad has changed for the better-it has more feedback, and the backlight is much better than on the original RAZR. The most significant change, however, is in the user interface. The phone is based on the Linux+Java platform, called MOTOMAGX. The interface is visually more refined and definitely  better than that of the older Motorola phones (the ones we’re used to cursing!). The multimedia, especially the music player, is excellent. Playback can be controlled without opening the flap, thanks to the touch-sensitive buttons. Audio quality is excellent, and the bundled   earphones are good. The phone supports the MP3, AAC, and AAC+ formats, but there’s no FM radio. Also, bundled memory is just 512 MB, with no expansion allowed-lame, from a media player perspective. The camera is reasonably good-about as good as any other 2MP cell phone camera. Indoors, photographs turn out dark; colours also get affected in low-light conditions. Video  ecording is strictly okay. In our tests, signal reception was good in all the conditions we put the phone through. Voice clarity was good, with no crackling or echo when we used the speakerphone. Battery life, when compared to the earlier model, is much better: with nominal usage, the phone remained alive for two days.