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| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: Motorola Q Black Phone (Verizon Wireless, Phone Only, No Service) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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User Submitted Motorola Q Black Phone (Verizon Wireless, Phone Only, No Service) Reviews (cont...)Date: 2007-06-02 The "Q" is terrible I went through three of these phones in a month before switching to a Blackberry. 1) Battery life - even the extended battery won't last a day with moderate use 2) Display light goes off too soon. If you change the setting it reverts back to the original one on its own 3) Constantly crashes and needs to be rebooted 4) Slow to recognize keystrokes 5) Gets really hot, so you need a bluetooth headset... but oh, that drains the pathetic battery even faster. 6) The contacts are set up very awkward compared to my treo (which i loved) 7) After long calls, the phone will fail to hang up, meaning you have to shut down and reboot. 8) All three of mine started glitching or wouldn't hold a charge within a few days of being brand new. The verizon people were great, but this phone is terrible and they know it. Be warned, if you buy this phone you will regret it. Date: 2007-05-08 Stylish but unreliable Ever since the advertisement for the Q came out on TV, I have been floored by its sleek and stylish design. I was waiting for my "get one every two" deal and when the time came, without hesitation I upgraded my phone to a black Q. The keys are large enough to comfortably type and the colors and sharpness of text were very aesthetically pleasing. Since I had built smartphone apps for a previous generation of the phone, naturally I gravitated to the Windows Mobile based device. Also, since this is a windows based device, I didn't have to read the manual (except for advanced features) to figure out how to use the device. Setting up eMail was a breeze and integration with Outlook was very cool with meeting reminders popping up on time, very conveniently. My honeymoon period with this phone was over rather quickly. One of the first things I did was to enter contacts from my old phone. Scrolling through the options for every contact revealed the slowness of the contact app. Selecting ringtones also had the same drawback - it took a noticeable amount of time to scroll through the ringtones before they would play the tune for preview. It was annoying to watch the field selector jump back and forth as the wheel was rotated, with each field painting itself slowly. Occasionally, when looking at a list view, the screen would draw blank but when you roll the wheel, items in selection would selectively paint themselves. Secondly, in the three weeks I had the device, it hung twice while making outgoing phone calls and once as I was browsing the web. On the first two occasions, I had to turn off phone and back on to get it usable again. It was like rebooting a Windows 95 device when it hung or bluescreened. This is a cell phone and I expect its uptime to be measured in months, not days. On the second occasion, gwes.exe crashed and I was asked whether the phone can send the error message to Microsoft, just like the promts on Windows XP when something goes awry. Again, I expect this device to behave like a phone, not like a desktop. The final straw was the battery life. You could see the battery draining in front of your eyes. That is how short the battery lasted. About a day of use with a couple of short phone calls and lots of email. It was constantly being charged when not in my hands. The power management setting that I selected (5 seconds for backlight to dim and 15 seconds for display to turn off) never persisted. It would temporarily be effective and then it would go back to a standard setting (5 seconds for display to turn off). This meant I had to constantly wake up the device if I was reading a page of eMail. I finally got fed up and exchanged this for a blackberry. While the latter looks and feels like a brick, it has been rock solid. Research in Motion got its device designed quite right and I feel Motorola and Microsoft failed to capitalize on a beautiful device design with the Q. I give this a 2 star for device design and intuitive ease of use. Date: 2007-05-06 I Think The Q is Great I haven't owned the Q but about 5 days now, but I love it. I buy and sell books through Amazon and the phone is great so that I can go to garage sales and look up books to see what they are worth. The internet feature works very well. I also am receiving my home e-mail on it. That seems to work pretty well also. I read in a eailer review where someone said the silver Q and the black Q is the same. I was told by the Verizon store that the Black Q is a better model then the silver one. I think I will opt to get the longer life battery. If you are going to use it a lot that might be something you would want to do when you buy it. Saturday, I woke up and went garage saling about 8am till about 11 am. I also talked on it about two hours and because it is new I messed around with it on and off most of the day. The original batter never did go dead on me but it was getting low by the end of the night. My wife ownes a Blackberry. It does not have voice reconition like the Q does. It also does not let you set up personal ring tones to contacts like the Q does. After I have had the phone a little longer I wil update with any problems. Date: 2007-04-26 Buy the Extended Battery!! - updated This phone is great for receiving emails, however, the battery life is just awful. The original battery that it comes with hardly lasted a day, and that was BEFORE i had my Outlook email set up. I have never had a phone that just died in the middle of the night. It just drains when you're not even using it. So i opted for the extended battery and although it is thicker it is definitely still a must buy. The phone will last a little over a day, but i opt to charge it every night. The battery costs about an extra 30 but well worth it. It's still lightweight and thin which is a main reason people choose the q. I chose the black one because of the look and feel as opposed to the silver plastic one. I would recommend this phone for people who are on the road often and need a simple way to receive and send emails. It is not too fancy and very user friendly. **UPDATE - 1 and a half years later I have had my q for under two years and i couldn't wait to get rid of it. I wasn't even up for an upgrade but i couldn't deal with it anymore. Even the extended battery hardly lasted long enough. If you are in an area without service, forget about having enough battery life until you get to a part with service. It drains it extremely quickly. There have been several times my battery did not last until 3:00 in the afternoon. there were spotaneous shutdowns which would cause me to have to reboot the whole phone. If this phone is even still available, i do not recommend it. I have now switched to the blackberry curve and i love it already! Date: 2007-03-10 BMW with a lawnmower motor. REVISED The Black one is the same as the silver one, but the rubbery black surface is nice, and not "plastic-y." You know about all the cool things this phone does, but it's all pretty much irrelevant as the battery won't last long enough to do them, much less keep you available for phone calls. The feeling of walking around with this thing is pretty much the same as when you are forced to use your laptop with out it's external power supply: you know your battery's gonna drain before you get back to your desk. Pair up a bluetooth headset, and you'll be lucky if it keeps a charge long enough to wait on hold with Verizon while you try to get them to swap it out. The shame is, if it had reasonable battery life, it'd be great in SPITE of all it's other quirks (which is why I gave it 3 stars instead of 2). You can pay extra for the extended life battery which is roughly twice the thickness, but that defeats half the allure of the device and you might as well just have a Treo, which I understand works pretty well. REVISION: Verizon sent me a new one of these after the first one I bought broke, froze and generally behaved psychotically. The replacement likes to shut itself on and off at will and oftentimes gives me un-fixable error messages when attempting to dial a simple phone number, requiring more time on hold with data/tech support, another trip to the Verizon store and ultimately (as my last one AND my girlfriend's Silver version of this phone did) a HARD reset, which in turn requires re-entering and resetting all personal settings and data. Even if you use Wireless Sync (Verizon's excellent on-line backup) you still have to go in and, one by one, change your contacts to list "first name first" should you so desire to have your names read like names. Amazon won't let me take off a star (Motorola should be happy to even get 2!) so I'll simply recommend that, unless you enjoy fixing phones, you avoid this one like a public restroom with an overflowing toilet.
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