The Moto Q 9h: Motorola Venturing into the Unfamiliar

Author: Moby
Filed under: Motorola
Date: Feb 22,2008

Moto Q9h
Wonder how it would be like if your Keypad became a Keyboard? Wonder no more, the Moto Q 9h is here. It is about time that Motorola veered into the unfamiliar. For years now, it has produced phones solely based on the RAZR V3, which is its best seller. But Motorola seemed to go towards the really unfamiliar clamshell design-less path with the Moto Q 9h. Why? Read on and find out.

Motorola is introducing a handset with a QWERTY keypad with the Moto Q 9h. It is actually a smart phone which is design for those who heavy text and email users. This is not the first handset equipped with this type of keypad, but it is by far the easiest to use.

As in BlackBerry handsets, the Moto Q actually has room for a QWERTY keypad. With its 4.7 x 2.6 x 0.5-inch and 4.7-ounce dimensions, it is to a large extent wider, taller, and heavier than most usual phones we know. However, it is still thin enough to be pocket-friendly.

The QWERTY keypad is great and tactile, though it can take a little getting used to. The keypad is seemingly designed to match the movement of the thumbs. The colour screen is large enough, though there might have been a little more room to make it wee bit wider. It does not have a scroll wheel to help skim through emails easier, but it does have an up and down select button on the right side. We figure not all users will appreciate this.

The Moto Q runs on the Windows Mobile 6 standard. It supports email sending through Exchange Servers and access to your Hotmail account. You can also access your mails through a server supported by BlackBerry. One thing we like about the Moto Q is that it provides a 3.5G HSDPA connectivity for pre-installed Internet Explorer and Opera browsers. It’s unfortunate that it does not support WiFi.

The Moto Q 9h is not just for business use. It also features a Windows Media player which enables watching online videos and play music files, among a few others. At the back is a 2-megapixel camera which is great for taking snapshots and for sending MMS. It also supports quad-band connectivity, a microSD expansion slot which can hold 400 songs and a few hundred photos.

We didn’t have high hopes in this phone’s camera so we were not all that disappointed. The pictures are not crisp and may be a little blurry, but it is good enough as a 2MP camera phone. Audio quality was excellent, without any noticeable muffling or distortions. It is also impressive how the phone can be very responsive, with no amount of lag except when multiple applications are used at the same time. You may need to get yourself an extra battery if you are a heavy data user or talker.

The Moto Q 9h is probably one of the best smart phones we have seen so far. It is surprisingly affordable relative to other smart phones. Though it does not have Wi-Fi or a scroll wheel, all the rest of its features compensate well for it.

The Motorola Q is available for $329.89 at ElephantCellular