The Motorola Q9h

The Motorola Q9h is a great communicator. With its excellent voice performance and keyboard and better than usual browser, this smart phone will keep you in touch whether via voice, e-mail, or Web.

A slab style handset, the Q9h isn't all that small at 4.7 by 2.6 by 0.5 inches, but it's relatively attractive in black with silver accents. It has a 2.4 inch 320 by 240 pixels display with an ambient light sensor that adjusts brightness dynamically. I found the screen easily readable both indoors and out. The best physical feature, though, is the keyboard. The keys are domed, raised, slightly grippe, and provide adequate click much better than any other AT&T device.

Motorola reestablished industry superiority in voice quality, and the Q9h is a worthy follow up. Voice calls on both AT&T's EDGE and its 3G networks sound fine, especially 3G calls, which are deep, well rounded, and clear. The volume, especially on the speaker phone, can knock your socks off, without your ever experiencing distortion.

The Q9h doesn't aggressively cancel background noise, but voices came through just fine on my tests. Signal strength was good as well. The Q9h uses Nuance's excellent Voice Signal voice dialing and command suite, which works over Bluetooth headsets. I couldn't test wired headset performance, though, because unlike retail models, my Q9h didn't come with an adapter for the micro-SD headset, charging, syncing jack.

The powerful speaker also helps the Q9h excel as a music player. It syncs with and supports the usual Windows Media Player formats, playing music through either its booming mono speaker, a wired headset used with an adapter, or (somewhat muddily) a Bluetooth headset. Video performance was a bit spottier.

Videos on the Q9h played in full screen, but stuttered occasionally, and I got relatively low frame rates on my Core Player video benchmark tests. The 330 MHz ARM11 TI OMAP2420 processor felt snappy enough in other applications, so it's a video problem. Video and music can be stored in the Q9h's roomy 132MB of on board memory or on a micro-SD card tucked into a convenient slot on the side, 4GB Kingston card worked fine.

Motorola, with the Q9h, is taking a stab at fixing Windows Mobile's flaws which in this case means replacing substandard Microsoft applications with superior third party applications. The Q9h defaults to the Opera Mobile browser, which renders pages more truly than Microsoft's Pocket Internet Explorer. The DataViz Documents To Go Microsoft Office suite lets you create new Word and Excel documents, which Microsoft's own programs don't allow. The application also handles very complex Power Point and PDF documents.

The Q9h connects to the Internet using AT&T's HSDPA 3G network; when it's roaming globally, it drops down to EDGE. There's no Wi-Fi option. On tests as a USB modem for a Windows XP PC, the Q9h posted relatively mediocre 3G speeds, ranging from about 400 to700 Kbps for downloads a surprising result, given that it works on the relatively fast HSDPA 3.6 standard. I've gotten speeds over a mega bites on other HSDPA 3.6 devices.

For messaging, the Q9h comes with the typical Windows Mobile e-mail client, which supports POP3 or IMAP, Windows Live, and Yahoo e-mail, delivering full HTML e-mail messages. Singular Xpress Mail add on bundles a somewhat unreliable "push" component. There's a basic AIM, Yahoo, Windows Live IM client as well, along with text and picture messaging inbox.

The 2 mega pixels camera is inconsistent : Photos taken in our simulated daylight lab looked clear and well balanced, but I saw blur in low light photos, and shots taken outdoors during daytime overexposed the bright areas. The video mode takes small but smooth 176 by 144 videos at 15 frames per second.