Motorola Q Smart Phone Coming Next Week
Posted by Anne B. McDonald | Tuesday, May 16, 2006 3:56 PM PT
Motorola hopes to roll out its
long-anticipated Q smart phone next week, President and Chief Executive Officer Ed Zander said today.
The information comes to us from Stephen Lawson of IDG News Service, who caught Zander as he spoke to a Gartner conference in San Francisco today.
Stephen says Zander played up the device as an enterprise tool. At the launch next week, Motorola will be joined by Electronic Data Systems and IBM Global Services, as well as its carrier partner and Microsoft, which is supplying the Q's Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, Zander said at the event. The Q will be ideal for applications such as using spreadsheets and CRM (customer relationship management) software on the road, he said. Here's what it looked like the last time Motorola provided PCW with a photo (2005).
The Q will come out first for
EV-DO, a 3G technology offered in the U.S. by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, Zander said. It should be available by year's end for UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) and possibly HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), a faster version of UMTS.
The Q will include still and video camera features as well as stereo MP3 music-playing capability. Motorola has been pushing the Q, a slim handset with a QWERTY keypad, as a rival to Research in Motion's BlackBerry and other combined data and voice handsets. It will offer better voice call quality than competing products, Zander said.
We'll see how the phone stacks up when we review it.
I am most concerned with its PDA functions. I am placing a 2gb mini disc to handle programs and information to 'pull up from'. My concern is tha the Moto Q will be too slow. Should I be cooncerned and just wait for the new ipaq pdas? That means I will have a pager,pda and phone, vs phone-pda and pager
I think unless you are living two lives there is no need to carry a pager and a phone.. You could have a Phone-page right away!
The Q will come out first for EV-DO, a 3G technology offered in the U.S. by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, Zander said. It should be available by year's end for UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) and possibly HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), a faster version of UMTS.
What does this language mean to consumers? Is it best to wait later in the year for the HSDPA?
EV-DO is a higher speed version of CDMA, just like HSDPA is higher speed version of UMTS (which is a combination of GSM and Wideband-CDMA). EV-DO has the advantage of being here now. UMTS is not really here (but it is in Europe and some other places) and is slower. But HSDPA variant will be faster.
One major thing is that UMTS can fall back on good old GSM/EDGE/GPRS when WCDMA coverage is absent. Which means you can go almost anywhere in the world and have a good chance of your phone working there. CDMA is used in relatively few places.
So, if I need the Q to work in Europe am I out of luck until the later versions?
Yes. CDMA is mostly good for US/Canada, Japan, S. Korea and few other oddball places in Africa and S. America.
EVDO is NOT a higher speed version of CDMA it is a seperate entity...
HAD a UMTS card from Cingular and the service was so slow, bad and spotty that THEY agreed to cancel my contract and refrund me for two months of the service.
YOu probably had EDGE and not UMTS card from Cingular. They've not released any UMTS cards yet (other than to companies testing the UMTS networks - they are still being built)
I see they have a user community now -- http://qsupportforum.motorola.com