Motorola's New Q Cell Phone

Less than two weeks after announcing its version of Motorola's new Razr 2, Verizon Wireless today followed up with the successor to another trend-setting Motorola handset, the Q PDA-cell phone hybrid.

The silvery Q, one of the first super-skinny Windows Mobile handsets with a QWERTY keyboard and a wide aspect-ratio screen, targeted business users, but the new version, called the Q music 9m, was created to entice a younger crowd that wants multimedia as well as messaging. It looks dramatically different, with a dark soft-touch surface with reddish accents, and a redesigned keyboard (no more Treo-esque elliptical keys). Here's a Motorola-supplied image:


And here's a close-up of the new keyboard, courtesy of PC World photographer Robert Cardin:

The Q-9m has two screen faces. A red keyboard button on the lower right toggles between the traditional Windows Mobile interface and a Motorola-designed multimedia player screen from which you can play music or run videos. Here's the Windows Mobile screen:

The Q-9m has two screen faces. A red keyboard button on the lower right toggles between the traditional Windows Mobile interface and a Motorola-designed multimedia player screen from which you can play music or run videos. Here's the Windows Mobile screen:And here's the multimedia interace (note that you can still get to your contacts and the start menu from bottom-screen entries activated by the handset's left and right touch keys):

Motorola says this is one of the first QWERTY-keyboarded devices that can access Verizon's VCast store for music downloads (which should go fairly swiftly as the device support's Verizon's fast EVDO data network). Another unusual feature: The SD card slot on the side can support large-capacity SD cards (4GB+); most handsets with SD support can only handle up to 2GB because of file-format issues.

And just in case you want to do real work as well as listen to music or watch videos with your handset, the handset comes with the Windows Mobile version of DataViz's Documents to Go productivity suite, a much more capable mobile productivity package than the Mobile Office apps that come with the OS.

The Q 9m is available online from Verizon starting today; it should appear in retail stores beginning next Monday. It goes for $350 with the usual two-year contract (a $50 mail-in rebate is available).