Motorola Q9h Review

As phones are getting more and more complicated, they are trying to obtain part of the functionality of the standard computer and replace it in some aspects, offering you to do your job on a device that is always with you, instead on the bulky and heavy computer. In 21st century, the communications are not verbal only anymore, the virtual reality is taking a great role in most people’s life, and the manufacturers of mobile phones know this. They are creating handhelds that will allow you to chat and send messages as on a computer, but doing this with a pocket-friendly device that hides in your palm when you are using it in a car, train, bus or on an excursion in the mountain or the desert.

When it comes to Pocket Email, BlackBerry comes in mind with a landscape display and QWERTY keyboard and  excellent email system, optimized for this interface. BlackBerry has been the leader in this market segment for years and this is a fact that the major manufacturers don’t like. So, here we are seeing one of the attempts to change this.

Motorola is the 3rd biggest manufacturer of cellphones world-wide, and is known for its flexibility when it comes to design, producing various phones in different styles, targeting different audiences. But there is one exact thing that differentiates the manufacturer in the last years – its design style. No matter if the phone is simple or complex, it (almost) always looks modern and sexy. The big hit was the RAZR series which were inherited by KRZR, SLVR, RIZR and others, but the device we will review is using this same idea of a slim phone, now packing it full of features.

Motorola Q9h or previously known as Q Q9, is a 3G HSDPA GSM phone, based on the idea of the Motorola Q. The original Q was announced in CDMA and GSM flavors, but launched only in CDMA. The US customers were able to use it with various carriers (Verizon, Sprint, Alltel, AMPd and other) and it was available in some other countries  (Canada for example)which have CDMA carriers, but the most-popular GSM standard was ignored. The Q GSM didn’t shipped and more than year later Motorola re-announced it in a new name, as Q8. The specifications didn’t changed and only the colors of the housing were slightly different, but according to Motorola this was a new phone. Together with it, Motorola announced a completely new device, called the Q9h. It comes with improved specifications, design and support for 3G network.

The Q-family is consisting of RAZR-like slim phones, using Windows Mobile Standard edition OS to obtain advanced functionality and eat out of the BlackBerry market share. The phones are with landscape QVGA displays and full hardware QWERTY keyboards, which combined with the Exchange Push Email of the WM convert them into powerful messaging phone with pocket-friendly size.

A look is enough to notice that the Motorola Q9h is from the same family as the first Q. It is a slim Windows Mobile smartphone with landscape display and QWERTY keyboard, hinting about its message centric orientation. While it is obvious that the two phones have much in common, they are also pretty different, thanks to the more mature look of the Q9h. The Q is rather targeted at the younger customers, while the Q9h looks classier, with one-piece keyboard curved line and rounded angles. Very slim and light weight for a feature-rich smartphone, it fits very well in the hand and excellent in the pocket, which was one of the main ideas when designing it. The used materials are in black, some parts are math others are glossy but both feel great and give the phone an excellent touch-feeling, which we can say is best in class. This is something very important for such phone, as customers who buy it will expect it to feel as a solid mini-computer, and not as a s cheap plastic toy. The only problem we had with the construction was the little play of the battery cover, but we hope this is just our unit, which is a prototype and has been passing through others before us.

Model	Dimension (Inches)	Dimension (mm)	Weight (oz)	Weight (Gramms)
Motorola Q9h	4.64" x 2.63" x 0.46"	118 x 67 x 11.8	4,72	134
Motorola Q	4.57" x 2.48" x 0.45"	116 x 63 x 11.5	4,06	115
Samsung BlackJack	4.44" x 2.32" x 0.46"	113 x 59 x 11.8	3,52	100
BlackBerry Curve	4.20" x 2.40" x 0.60"	107 x 61 x 15.5	3,90	110,5
T-Mobile Dash	4.42" x 2.46" x 0.53"	112.5 x 62.5 x 13.5	4,23	120

One of the things that differentiates the Q9 from other WM Standard phones on the market is the display, which untypically is in landscape orientation instead of portrait one. This gives larger width and makes it more convenient when it comes to text or internet browsing. Another similar phone is the Samsung BlackJack i607, which AT&T offers also as an alternative to the BlackBerry phones. HTC’s offer is the Excalibur, available as the T-Mobile DASH, but it doesn’t support 3G.

2.4 inches in diagonal, it is pretty large for the overall size of the phone and with the standard QVGA resolution still gives good DPI (dots per inch) ratio. Although it has only 65k colors (some phones offer 16 million colors, which is 256 times more!), the TFT display is excellent and have very accurate color representation. Thanks to a sensor that controls its brightness level, it remains visible even in bright outdoor light which is hard to most displays without sensor unless you manually set their brightness at 100% everytime. We believe that such sensor is a must for every new phone.

As we said earlier, this class of phones is characterized by the display and the keyboard, and while the display is great, the keyboard of the Q9h is probably the best on the market. Although it must be small to fit in the slim phone, and although there is almost no physical space between the separate buttons, they felt excellent thanks to the relief and are pressed softly, with robust feedback. Typing text is extremely fast and very comfortable and as the candybar Q Q9 is narrower than a landscape-oriented PDA with sliding keyboard (АT&T (Cingular) 8525 for AT&T, HTC Mogul for Sprint, T-Mobile Wing for T-Mobiles USA and others), you don’t have to move your hand from one position to the other and the smaller size actually gives better performance! When typing a short text this doesn’t make great difference, but the more you type the more you will appreciate the excellent small QWERTY. If you type long text it will feel more comfortable than the competition and will save you some time and tiredness.

The keyboard is in four rows, with the bottom one housing shortcuts and the Space key, which is twice bigger than the other buttons which is slightly smaller than we would have loved to, but does its job very well. The other six keys on this row are Calendar, Contacts, 0/+, Windows Media Player,Camera, Voice recognition. The 5 shortcuts are pretty useful and we appreciate that Motorola included them here.


The 0/+ key is here, as the numeric keyboard is oriented as a standard one of a phone, but the numbers are put as alternative characters, in (darker) blue color. An illuminated line at the top of each also helps to find them fast among the others.

Above the QWERTY, in the flat glass-like surface around the display, are situated the navigation keys. The 5-way metallic D-pad with the reflecting middle position is very comfortable and with average to large size. In contrast to most WM PPC phones, it has backlight both around the 4-sides and around the middle position. Surrounding are the two soft keys and the home and back buttons respectively situated below. Illuminated curved lines divide them from the Internet and Answer on the left and the Messaging shortcut and Reject on the right.

The only other keys are the ones on the slim right side, which are designed as alternative navigation. Here you will find Up, select and Down buttons tightly next to each other but with good relief so can be felt with no problem. Below is the Back arrow key, necessary to navigate through the menus. All four keys have excellent relief, press response and feedback. The trio replaces the Wheel found on the first Q, and Motorola claim that after tests with lots of different people, this navigation method proved to be better. We believe this!

Standard, the four side keys are not illuminated, but the ones on the front are. Motorola has used light blue backlight for all characters, with only the numeric keys being in darker blue to differentiate visually. All buttons are illuminated very saturate.

The glossy left side houses only the universal microUSB port, which is used for charging, synchronization with computer and for attaching the headphones. Motorola was the first to use this type of connector (in the Q9h and the RAZR2 family) instead of the senior miniUSB, but Nokia followed the example and showed three models with microUSB (8600 Luna, 6500 Classic and 6500 Slide), which means the standard will most probably get very popular. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to use earlier accessories you have and in order to plug standard headphones (3.5mm jack) one must find an adapter, which still is not as easy as finding a 2.5-3.5mm or miniUSB–3.5mm one.

Visit the Gallery for Additional images of the Motorola Q9h

Interface:

The Motorola Q9h is a Windows Mobile 6 Standard edition smartphone, which is the version for phones with non-touch-sensitive displays. The original Q was one of the first phones to offer Windows Mobile 5 and here it is logically upgraded to the newer version.

This means the Motorola Q9h will share many things with other devices using this OS, even ones not made from Motorola. The OS is not proprietary and looks the same on all phones, with small exceptions due to personalization. If you are not familiar with the OS, please check the review of the HTC Vox S710, which also is WM6 Standard phone and can be used in landscape orientation. In the review below we will mention only some things and the unique features for the Moto Q9h.

The HomeScreen is what you can expect but due to the landscape orientation, the items are slightly rearranged. The main menu visualizes in two rows with four icons per each and with scroll to more options. Motorola has personalized the icons of some menus like the Settings and File Manager for example in order to look up to date, but this doesn’t change the functionality in any way. A WM customer won’t find any surprises.

Phonebook:

The phonebook is absolutely the same as on any other WM6 Standard phone, and searching of a name is that flawless and extra fast, thanks to the QWERTY keyboard, typing the name directly from the home screen. This fast name search is something we love in WM phones without touch-displays and should act as an example to all phone manufacturers.

Voice recognition is getting more and more advanced and popular, but still Windows Mobile don’t offer a system built-in. If your WM smartphone has one than the manufacturer has added it is its personalization of the OS. In our case, Motorola has included VoiceSignal system, which is a speaker-independent one. It starts for about a second after the shortcut key is held and allows you to Call or send a message to name of the contact list or to a number you enter by voice, to send an email to a name, to lookup for one or to open an application.

Connectivity:

The first Q was announced as a CDMA EV-DO phone with GSM version, but the GSM version didn’t hit the market. It was available only in CDMA/EV-DO flavor and in the US is still offered by a variety of carriers including Verizon, Sprint and Alltel. The Q8 comes as its GSM variant and the Q9h is the 3G/GSM phone, which comes with different design and improved specs. It is quad-band GSM which allows it to work in networks on any continent, but the 3G support is limited depending on the version. The America version will support 850/1900 MHz bands for UMTS/HSDPA 3.6Mbps 3G and won’t be usable in Europe. Another version will have the 1700MHz UMTS band, which T-Mobile will use for its 3G in the US.

The European version we are testing has only 2100MHz for Europe/Asia. We would have liked to see at least tri-band 3G (850/1900/2100 MHz) module built-in as in some of HTC’s 3G smartphones, or why not a quad-band UMTS/HSDPA module that will make the phone universal.
Probably the greatest drawback of the Q9h whem we compare it to the rival models is the lack of WiFi, or Wireless Lan.

Software:

The Windows Mobile Operating System brings resemblance with the desktop version and offers pocket versions of some well known applications like File Explorer, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. In addition to the standard Internet Explorer, by default the Motorola Q9h comes equipped with pocket Opera, which is a good alternative. Although both browsers have pros and cons, we prefer the Opera, but still it is not the ultimate program for device with screen with size of only 320 pixels. The not-final version of Microsoft Deepfish is better for reading a text on a page, as it renders the pages almost exactly as on a computer.


As any other phone on the market nowadays, the Motorola Q9h has built in camera. Like the first Q, it is positioned in the top part of the back panel but this time the LED is next to it. The resolution is improved from 1.3 to 2 megapixels which isn’t much but is enough for such phone. As this is just an additional feature, the design of the camera is made to not attract attention, unlike in camera-dedicated phones.

The interface starts for about 2.5 seconds and will not impress you at all, as it takes only half the screen and the settings are in a text-based menu. Still you can use digital zoom, set the white balance or the flash mode (on/off), as well as the resolution, with the biggest one being 1600x1200 pixels.

You can also capture video clips, and we are happy that the resolution of QVGA (320x240 pixels) makes the videos usable.

The Motorola Q9h has 256MB of ROM (Flash) Memory and 96MB RAM, which puts it one step ahead of the competition. Most WM6 Standard phones come only with 128 MB ROM and 64MB RAM which is respectively 50% and 75% of the Q9h’s resources. For storing of more files helps the slot for microSD cards, which means you can add a card with amount of several gigabytes.

By Default, all Windows Mobile 6 phones are equipped with Microsoft Mobile Office applications, to open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Strangely, Motorola Q9h replaces them with “Documents To Go” programs which are supposed to do the same but are not that good. We tested those applications with standard files we use on all capable phones, and are not very happy with the results. The Word documents can be viewed and edited with no problems, but as we put more complicated Excel sheet and the errors started to occur. The program didn’t really get to work with the multiple sheets and entered in Read-Only mode. Only one of the two PowerPoint files visualized correctly and the PDF reader also had some problems with the fonts, when set at 100% zoom. Zip To Go is handy for opening of archived files, but unfortunately RAR archives are not supported.

Performance:

The Motorola Q9h was very adequate and fast-operating  for a smartphone, which was easy to notice after just a few minutes of usage.  Even loaded with more applications in the RAM, the phone didn’t lag and remained very usable. It works excellent as a computer, but will it be so as a phone?

The Reception test gave mediocre results, and the score of the Q9h is average 5 out of 10. We would have like to see a 7 or more, but that’s all.

The Sound Quality during a call is better and as a whole it is good in both directions. The voices you hear are thick which makes them not realistic, but otherwise clear and comprehensible. The other party hears you very close to the real thing and with strong volume, which gives for excellent calling experience.

Conclusion:

Is that a flawless phone? The lack of WiFi shows it is not. Is it very good – definitely yes! Targeted as a rival of the BlackBerry phones, the Q9h offers excellent QWERTY keyboard that beats almost everything on the market and proves to be best in its size class.  The functionality is as good as you can expect from a WM6 Smartphone and from a smart phone as a whole, and the system performance is also excellent. The best thing is that all this is packed into a slim and sexy body with excellent construction and feel. The Q9h is a brilliant messaging device or smartphone with extended messaging functionality (depending on the way you will use it) and we highly recommend it!