Motorola's Quirky New Smartphone

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All that good stuff aside, I had several problems with the Q. The name Q stands for QWERTY, for the phone's easy-to-type-on keypad. (It's more spacious than the cramped Treo and BlackBerry keypads.) But the phone's name is also a nod to James Bond's gadget guru, who was called "Q." The problem is the phone sometimes runs as if it should still be in Q's trouble-shooting lab—the one Bond always ventured into before going out on a death-defying assignment.

BATTERY BLUES.

The phone is supposed to get four hours of talk time and eight days of standby. I can't tell you how many times the "low battery" warning flashed well before the end of the day—as I was downloading e-mail or trying to make a call from a cab. Nothing is more frustrating.

Almost nothing, that is. To save battery life, the phone's backlight cuts off faster than Bond could get a girl. While trying to show the phone to a friend (who is a BlackBerry user) the light kept turning off. Finally, he asked, "How come I can't see anything?" I often thought about going into the phone's settings to adjust the light so it would stay on longer. But that would have made the battery drain even faster.

So what about the phone's primary application, e-mail? Unfortunately, I don't have much positive to say about it. The Q runs Windows Mobile 5.0 software from Microsoft (MSFT). It's compatible with Microsoft Outlook, so I used the phone's sync software and cable to pull the Outlook mail from my PC each day. (It was too much trouble to get our IT guys to arrange for me to get Outlook mail from our corporate server over the air.) Still, it was convenient to have my mail and calendar info in my pocket.

MESSY WINDOWS.

To get mail wirelessly, I set up a mobile e-mail account using Yahoo! (YHOO). It worked, but getting my mail was painfully slow, like pulling up buckets of water from a deep, old farm well. Even more maddening is when you click to read an individual Yahoo! e-mail. Too often you have to press another button to "get entire message and any attachments." When I clicked, what did it say? "Message and all attachments will download next time you connect and receive e-mail." Sending and receiving, however, is another slo-mo encounter since I have over a thousand Yahoo! e-mails.

Now, you can apparently set this up so the Q works a bit more smoothly. But I'll be frank, this version of Windows needs some work. Motorola opted to use a streamlined version of Windows made for plain old cell phones. This is not the Pocket PC version made for data-centric products. The Q uses the so-called "Smartphone" version of Windows Mobile, which doesn't work well with attachments. You can't manipulate them the way you can on the Treo or BlackBerry. And while you're supposed to be able to view them, I rarely could stand to go through the trouble.

Why did Motorola insist on a truncated brand of Windows? The main reason is that Zander and his team wanted the device to be a phone first. Everyone who has used a Blackberry, for instance, knows it doesn't allow you to make a call conveniently, and the call quality is unreliable.

GOOD START.

Well, the Q is built to talk. Press the numbers on the keypad and it automatically assumes you're making a call, just like a phone does. It even presents a list of possible contacts it thinks you're trying to reach as you dial the number. You can select one and place the call by pressing a single button, or keep dialing.

Need a speakerphone? Just hit a button on the lower right side of the keypad. The keypad, which designers spent months perfecting, also has a few other nifty one-touch buttons. The camera key is next to the speaker button, and the mail key is on the bottom left.

I'm betting that with Motorola's prodding, Microsoft will eventually get Windows to work with a little more one-click functionality. Right now you dig down into menus too much, and far more than you have to with the Treo and Blackberry.

Zander likes to say that this is just version 1.0 of the Q, implying that the next version will be better. If you're not a heavy e-mail user and just need a sleek device to keep your office data in your pocket, try the Q. Serious mobile users might want to wait for version 2.0.

Crockett is deputy manager of BusinessWeek's Chicago bureau .