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.
