Gadgetory

a QVGA display Windows Mobile five and a jog dial if that spec sheet doesn't get your flag wavin you're too young to be watching this I'm Michael Fisher this is PocketNow and this is our throwback review of the Motorola Q the summer of 2006 in America telegin Nights was top of the box office Nickelback battled hinder for but rock supremacy and your host for this video was busily growing the weirdest mustache in the history of Virginia Beach but more importantly a hotly anticipated mobile phone was hitting the market a device poised to challenge then incumbent rims blackberry family in the qwerty space a new windows mobile device unlike any other that smartphones named the Motorola Q the Q was Motorola's attempt to port the design aesthetic of the wildly successful original razor to a smartphone and it was a brilliant success at eleven point nine millimeters thick the Q is a little chunky by today's standards but for the time it was impossibly thin and even by today's metrics it's very very light at 115 grams when I first saw one in the wild it was being slid into a back pocket I imagined trying to do the same with some of its contemporaries and laughed a lot while the slick looks and lightweight served it well the Q wasn't without its limitations Windows Mobile 5 for smartphones was a powerful platform but it didn't always run snappily on the Q's processor a 312 megahertz intel xscale also the tiny 1130 milliamp hour battery didn't offer the best endurance and the non touch display while bright and sharp for the day was also pretty small at 2.4 inches compared to its Pocket PC competitors but the Q was never meant to be a powerhouse it was meant as a prosumer grade blackberry replacement I mean look no further than the spacious QWERTY keyboard and the side mounted jog dial the q replicated the BlackBerry layout perfectly with scroll wheel on the right side and a back key placed directly underneath unlike a blackberry though these controls were augmented by a four-way d-pad and back and send an end keys just below the display giving the user a choice in terms of navigation the jog dial on our unit here is broken but when it did work it was quite handy for scrolling webpages and emails and text messages and the keyboard was actually pretty great for its time though windows Mobile's half-hearted predictive text and the tendency to drop the occasional character kept the cue from real messaging powerhouse status illuminating that keyboard was the same shade of blue as the electroluminescent backlighting on the razor completing the futuristic look of the cue our unit here is finished in the original silver but Motorola would later release black and gray soft touch variants both of which looked very sharp the q' includes many forerunners of today's standard smartphone features a mini USB port instead of micro USB a mini SD card slot instead of micro SD a 2.5 millimeter instead of a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and even an IR port an accessory that disappeared for a while but which is finally starting to make a comeback there's no Wi-Fi on board but the Q's radio does support a video the high-speed data of 2006 when 3G was still as good as it got this being a Motorola device phone calling was a pleasure and the speakerphone was loud and the build quality was high enough that you could toss the queue around without worrying too much about jarring a button loser busting the battery door off the 1.3 megapixel camera produced ok photos for the time which could be shared via MMS or email remember this was before mobile Facebook and Twitter took off the queue launched on Verizon at a non-contract price of 1 $99.99 after rebates very reasonable considering everything packed into its tiny frame it would later go on to other carriers and it would unfortunately develop a somewhat spotty reputation and user reviews it's likely the return rate on this device was pretty high but if you were willing to put up with its quirks there were definitely good units to be found I carried mine for a solid year something of a personal record before the summer of o6 many people still associated windows smartphones with big clunky stylus Laden monsters built only for the Geek Squad with the Q Motorola changed all that it built a slim super stylish smartphone with a great keyboard a bright display and a blackberry beating feature set that satisfied all but the most hard-core mobile mavens the cue played a huge role in consumer izing the smartphone in 2006 no small feat and one that deserves not just a nostalgic look but our continued respect folks that's going to do it for this episode of the pocket now throwback hope you enjoyed it to see our videos as soon as they go live subscribe to our channel follow us on all our social media feeds drop us a like if you enjoyed this one leave a comment if you have something to say or a fond memory to share about the queue and thank you for watching as always we'll see you next time