Motorola Q9m Review

Camera:

Unlike the 2MP Camera that is featured on the Q9h, the Q9m is stricken with a lower quality 1.3MP Camera. The application take 3 seconds to load and will show a small viewfinder in the center of the display. Pressing the center button on the navigation pad will capture the image in under 1 second and will show it on the screen for reviewing. From there you can send the image via Bluetooth, send in a Message, Delete, and Save. The overall image quality of pictures taken outside is lacking, with poor color representation and soft edges. Low-Light and Flash pictures taken indoors appear to be blurry. The Auto White Balance also has problems adjusting to different types of light, so you must manually set the white balance. Menu options include Brightness, Resolution, Zoom, White Balance, and Flash. Videos can also be recorded, but are limited to 176x144 resolution. Even though this is a SmartPhone, there is nothing “smart” about the quality of pictures and videos that it is capable of capturing.



Multimedia:

Being that this is a Multimedia device, the Q9m is capable of playing back MP3 and WMA audio files, as well as videos, in either the Windows Media Player or while using the Multimedia Home Screen. Music stored on your miniSD card is listed by Album, Artist, and Genre. Once the song begins to play, the Multimedia Home Screen will show the cover art, along with the artist’s name and song title. The quality of music playback is quite impressive, thanks to the stereo speakers. It is unfortunate however that they are located on the back of the phone, and require you to flip the phone over to enjoy their true sound quality. For the best sound quality, it is recommended to connect a pair of Bluetooth Stereo headset, since the phone supports A2DP and AVRC profiles.



Software:

The Q9m only comes with 104MB of Internal Memory, which is divided equality between Device Storage and RAM Storage. Despite the low amount of internal memory, it is capable of accepting up to a 4GB miniSD card for additional storage, which would provide plenty of room for music, pictures, videos, documents, and applications.

Even though this is a Windows Mobile 6 device, Motorola decided to replace the standard Microsoft Office applications with “Documents To Go” applications. They allow you to access PDF files, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and ZIP files. This can be very useful when needing to access a file when you are not near a computer, or when downloading an E-Mail attachment. Despite their usefulness, they can be problematic when opening some files and are not as feature-rich as their PC counterpart. We found that some larger Excel files would not display properly, and certain PDF files would produce an error saying that some fonts were not supported. Most Word and PowerPoint documents were able to be shown without problems.