The Realm of the Verbal Processor

New cell phone – Moto Q9c

For the last few years, my cell phone has been a PDA phone. My first PDA phone was a Treo 650. Very nice phone. At some point last year, I had the opportunity to switch to a Windows Mobile 5 based phone (PPC6700) for no charge…essentially I could sell my Treo 650 for the same amount I could buy the PPC 6700 for. No brainer…right?

I will say that I did enjoy a few things about the phone. I liked the large slide out keyboard, the touchscreen, voice dialing, internet access. It was difficult to make a one handed phone call with. A friend of mine calls it the “tree phone”…if you try to make a call while driving…you will hit a tree.

There was one particular aspect of the phone that I despised…battery life. Standby time could be summed up as “you dang well better plug it in at night.” Talk time? How about using one percent of battery per minute talking?  Oh yeah…those times are with everything but the phone turned off. Wi Fi is turned off. Bluetooth is turned off. Not connecting to the EV-DO data network. If you turned those things on…it was much worse. Battery life made the phone just simply unusable.

I’ve been looking at other PDA phone options for a while. Because I’m with Sprint, I restricted my looking to phones offered by them.  I hadn’t found one that I thought would be better, so I kept holding off. Then in December I noticed that Sprint had a new phone…the Motorola Moto Q 9c. After doing a bit of research I found a few interesting tidbits.

It’s a Windows Mobile 6 phone. That’s good. It’s a Smartphone…so it doesn’t have a touchscreen…I can go either way on that.  A plus to that is that there is no stylus to lose. Then I came across a CNET review of the phone. Battery life rating by Sprint/Motorola is 7.2 hours of talk time. CNET’s battery drain test gave it 7.5 hours of talk time. SIGN ME UP! Talked to my boss. Got the purchase approval (he used to have a PPC6700 also…he knew the battery woes well). Ordered the phone. I’ve had the phone for 2 1/2 weeks.

My first big battery life test was to fully charge it and then drive back to Orlando from Pennsylvania. I had it pulling in my Exchange email as it came in, so it was full time connected to the EV-DO network. We drove through the night, and I crashed once we got to Orlando. When I plugged it in the next night, it had been going for 36 straight hours. The battery had only gone down to I think 70%. Wow…what a difference. The PPC6700 would only last four or five hours when connected to EV-DO.

I have been very pleased with the phone. I love the battery life. I love the fact that I can actually use the data capabilities…like grabbing my email continuously…something I hadn’t been able to do for lack of battery. I like the crisp screen. I like the improved voice recognition. I like the customization I have been able to do with the look/feel/sound of the phone. It is just incredibly usable. I like the size. It’s big enough that it is usable as a PDA phone. It’s thin enough that I can put it in my pocket.

Something I did have to adjust to is the need to lock the keypad before putting it in my pocket. If not…it will dial a random phone number. Overall…I love the new phone.

January 20, 2008 - Posted by Jarvis | tech | Moto Q9c, PPC6700, smartphone, Sprint, Windows Mobile 6