Motorola Q Phone Makes Leap To AT&T

By Joseph Palenchar -- TWICE, 11/1/2007

Schaumburg, Ill. — The latest version of Motorola’s Q smartphone is the company’s first U.S.-market Q phone with W-CDMA high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) and the first Q phone available for the AT&T Wireless network.

The Motorola Q phone was promoted as the first mass-market QWERTY-keyboard smartphone during its Verizon Wireless launch in 2006. A follow-up Verizon version optimized for music playback and social networking was released in September.

AT&T’s Q phone, available Nov. 2 at $199 with two-year contract, is one of the first phones to support AT&T’s latest HSDPA iteration, which boosts theoretical download speeds to 3.6Mbps from 1.8Mbps, said Brian Stech, global marketing and channel development director for Motorola’s enterprise devices. One other AT&T phone supporting that speed is the Pantech Duo smartphone, released earlier this week by AT&T. With the upgraded HSDPA technology in its more than 200 W-CDMA markets, AT&T promises average real-world throughout of 600kbps to 1.4Mbps.

The AT&T Q features the Windows Mobile 6 Standard smartphone OS and an integrated QWERTY keyboard. Compared with the previous models, the new Q adds turn-by-turn driving instructions (enabled with TeleNav service), the Opera Web browser to offer a better browsing experience than Microsoft Explorer for small-screen devices and included DataViz application. DataViz lets users originate Microsoft documents, not just read and edit them as provided by the Windows Mobile 6 Standard OS, Stech said. The Q is the first Windows Mobile smartphone with included DataViz, he added. The application has been available on other Windows Mobile smartphones only as an extra-cost download. DataViz also enables the reading and editing of zip and pdf files.

In another enhancement, Motorola is including free downloads of one of three applications bundles, each targeted to one of three segments found to be using Q phones. They are businesspeople, youth for whom social networking via messaging is important and “home CEOs” who use messaging to organize their home lives, Stech said.

Like the most recent version, the new Q also features seven hard buttons dedicated to seven of the most-used features, such as media playback, Web browsing, speakerphone and picture taking. Other features include ambient light sensor to control screen brightness and reduce battery drain, microSD slot with capability to use SDHC cards at up to 32GB capacity when available, and barrel-shaped keys to speed up typing.