Motorola Q9h Review

Permalink: Motorola Q9h Review by Franz Bicar

Motorola smartphones have come a very long way. Its earlier smartphone offerings never really made that impact to society. But, they learned from those mistakes and now gives us their Q series, which is by the way, a very attractive and functional phone.

The Motorola Q9h is a Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition smartphone from Motorola. It boasts of a landscape QVGA non-touch screen, a 2 megapixel camera, GPS, Bluetooth 2.0, 325MHz TI CPU, 256 megs of flash memory and 96 megs of RAM. Actually, the phone is bulky when compared to previous smartphones from motorola. But hey, an improvement in memory, a better camera and a much improved GPS will take your mind of those trivial points and really enjoy this phone.

The Q9h Global has a QWERY miniature keyboard. This keyboard is probably one of the best keyboards for a PDA/Smartphone out there in the market today. This is no surprise as the Q series has led the pack in ergonomic miniature keyboards for their smartphones.

Aside from this, the phone also includes dedicated application keys for easy access of the most useful functions. There are dedicated keys for calendar, contacts, Windows Media Player Mobile, the camera and voice command along the bottom row. Press and hold the Home button to bring up the profiles manager which also handles keyguard, power and wireless radio management.

As a phone, the Q9h is a quad band 850/900/1800/1900MHz GSM. Which probably means that the phone will work anywhere as long as theres a signal with support for those figures/GSMs mentioned up there. Voice quality for this phone is excellent and is very clear and loud. Its volume is not too soft and not too loud - you can say that its just enough. The rear-firing stereo speakers make for an excellent speakerphone that’s loud enough for noisy environments and doesn’t distort wildly at high volume.

The Q9h also features HSDPA support. It has a dual band 850/1900MHz 3.5G radio that supports both US bands used by AT&T, but not overseas bands. Connections are definitely fast and reliable - very convenient in browsing the web. For those who wish to tether and use the Q9h as a wireless modem for a notebook, the phone supports Dial-up networking and gives fast connections that averages about 900kbps.

Additional info for this phone includes the fact that it utilizes a 325MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 2420 CPU. It also ups the ante on memory with 256 MB of flash memory rather than the usual 128 MB and 96 MB of RAM rather than the standard 64. With 135 MB of flash memory available for storage, you can install plenty of 3rd party applications, email attachments and documents on the phone.

You can also store your music and even video collections on this phone. But, you will have to make use of its microSD card support. The Q Global can handle cards up to 32 gigs capacity - if you can find any. As far as I know, 32GB of microSD is not in the market yet. But still, 4, 6 or 8GB is already huge.

Furthermore, the Q’s bright and sharp landscape QVGA 320 x 240 display makes it an excellent vehicle for video playback. Playback is handled by Windows Media Player Mobile and the transition is smooth going between the browser and the player.

As for this phone’s camera, all you can probably say is good. Motorola isn’t really that well-known when it comes to its phone cameras. The Q9 Global’s 2.0 megapixel camera is decent however. Colors are reasonably accurate, there’s plenty of image data to make for a sharp, but generally not over-sharpened image, and saturation is good under indoor low light.

Motorola used on this phone Microsoft’s standard bundle Pictures and Videos application as the camera software. You can adjust resolution, adjust brightness, set white balance from a list of presets, turn the flash on or off and use burst mode or timer mode. There’s 8x digital zoom and the camera can automatically save images to a storage card.

The video recorder can record video with audio at an uninspiring 176 x 144 and 128 x 96 at 15fps and has 4x digital zoom. Those are postage stamp sized videos, but quality is decent. The fixed-focus lens manages to keep things relatively sharp for both still shots and video, and as with most camera phones, the flash helps only when the subject is close.

Sources:
http://www.pcmag.com
http://www.phonearena.com
http://mobilitytoday.com