Motorola will have the Q out by Xmas
By Peter Rojas 
posted September 24th 2005 11:12AM
posted September 24th 2005 11:12AM
Not sure if the news about that new Windows Mobile-powered
Treo 700w lit a fire under their asses or not, but
Motorola CEO Ed Zander is promising that they'll have their new
superskinny Q smartphone in stores (at least some stores)
by December, which would be a month or two ahead of schedule (they'd originally said the Q wouldn't go on sale until Q1
of 2006 at the earliest). They're also expecting to have that new
pink-colored RAZR out by Christmas, too.
[Via Smartphone Thoughts]
èa?AŸ%Ÿ%
A limited Smartphone-powered device that's the size of a Pocket PC?
How useful...
Will they call the pink Razr the Lady Schick?
pink razr better hit sooner thatn that...the v3c and v3i(maybe) will be out by december. maybe its just me but i would take an mp3 player and edge or ev-do over pink anyday.
*YAWN*
Come on Motorola, you sell some awesome Linux-powered phones in China, where's your juicy bits for the U.S.?
merry xmas, happy hannukah, and happy kwanza
maybe they realized the rokr was a dud and needed to get the q out to keep up the moto hype.
I am still hearing may for some people on this one... well that is the UK anyway..
Well all I can tell you is that 2 months ahead of schedule means lots of bugs. Motorola is known to release some of the buggiest software in their first version phones.
The Q can't compete against the new Treo 700w.
Sure it's thin, but that's not the only desired virtue in a smart phone. It's too wide in the other dimensions and that makes it too large.
This would be good if not for the Treo (and for those who focus on corporate email, the Blackberry), but as it is it is too little too late.
Wow... tough crowd... I guess there'll be plenty of units for me to pick from. C'est la vie :-)
I'd much rather have the Moto Q than the thick and wide Blackberry that I carry now.
What carrier will get this first? I am certain that I'll have to switch since I am now with Nextel.
What I'm curious about is if this December release will be the CDMA or GSM version.
The Q may look nice, but it certainly is no Treo... It's a smartphone, not a pocketpc, so don't expect any touch...
Close, but not a Treo...
In my opinion the Treo sucks. It looks nice and feels nice in the hand but it is heavy and not usable by adult men. The keyboard is too small. Many people at my company that have them complain about it locking up like the days of Windows 3.1, 95, and 98.
It's no Treo and that is a good thing.
I just don't know what to do anymore. I was really looking forward to the new Treo, as the reason I like the Treo so much is the Palm OS. Take Palm OS away from the Treo 650, and all you've got is a bloated pda phone with little internal memory and no wifi. (Although the screen itself is very nice.)
I had my hopes up for the next Treo to fix the bugs in the 650, bring Palm OS up to date to be comparable with something from this century, maybe add OS integrated wifi support. I've had a wish list longer than a 6 year old's Christmas list for Treo/Palm OS improvements.
But now that their going to the Windows platform, where do I go now? I put so much stock in the 650 because it's the "best' PDA phone you can get with an American carrier right now, despite an endless amount of bugs, and other quirks, I still love it. I just can't support the new Windows Treo. I foresee it being a very rough transition, with the first few firmwares being worse than Mac OSX 10.0.0
I want to think that the Motorola Q isn't going to suck. I really do. I like the idea of having an ultra-pocketable qwerty phone. My girlfriend has the RAZR, and carrying that around in my pocket has made me aware how accustomed I've come to having a huge hulking turd bulging out of the front pocket of my blue jeans for years now. To say any Motorola phone is a "good" phone would be inaccurate when you compare it to any of the competition.
The RAZR is small, but what else does it have going for it? The VGA camera is worse than most other camera phones, it has a measly 4MB of onboard memory, and the OS hasn't seen a single noteworthy improvement since their first GSM camera phones. I've fully accepted that the Q is going to have to make some of the same sacrifices to fit in to the ultra-slim form factor. That's OK, provided a rock-solid and powerful OS that most importantly, ISN'T BUGGY.
I'm cautiously optimistic about Motorola rushing the Q to market. On one hand, I'm really anxious to see reviews of the retail version, rather than the development versions... But, on the other hand, NO electronic device that has EVER been rushed to market has turned out well. Cutting months off firmware and hardware development time is going to force Motorola's engineers to cut corners.
The best case would be solid hardware and buggy firmware which can be patched later... Which is really sad, considering how excited I was for this device.
Please, Motorola, prove me wrong. Until then, I'll be sitting here with my fingers crossed repeating, "Please don't suck, Q... Please don't suck."
The "Q" looks promising. But there are a bunch of motos out there that SHOULD have been successful - they were promising too. But all seem to have become orphans very quickly. The A780 is a case in point: great concept - Linux, flip smartphone with handwriting and voice recognition, music, lots of expandable memory, etc. But when you search for info about it, you can see where to buy it unlocked, but it looks like getting support for it is virtually impossible. I get the impression that this has been a pattern with motos, and is a real cause for concern -- even if a company like cingular picks it up, because I've also watched them drop phones pretty quickly as well.
#8: you say that it is too wide. I have not seen any published dimensions other than it's thickness (11.5 mm).
Does anyone know the overall dimensions? Looks can be deceiving. Things that are flatter appear to be wider.
One of these days some one will make a virtual screen device such that the device is not wide but the screen is. Until then, I'll have to settle for a regular phone that is not wide that has a small screen. Or I'll have to fill my pocket wide with a screen that is visible at arms length.
From the picture it looks to be about the same width as my Dell Axim X50, but quite a bit thinner.
Very promising. I would definitely consider it over the Treo 700w or Treo 700P but I don't believe it has a touchscreen. That is the deal breaker for me.