Motorola Q Cell Phone Review - Making/Receiving Calls
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Richard Baguley Published on March 08, 2007 Comment on this |
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Dialing Speed (3.39)In our tests, we found that dialing a number took an average of 5.8 seconds: a pretty standard time. You don’t have to enter the phone application to dial: if you start entering numbers on the home page, the Q assumes you are entering a phone number and dials the entered number when you hit the call button.
Talk and End Button (6.0)
Calls are initiated and ended with the two small call/answer and power/end buttons above the keyboard. These are pretty small and easy to miss; more than once I found myself hitting the home button when trying to dial, or the right soft button when trying to hang up a call. There is a small ridge that separate the buttons, but that’s easy to miss.
Call Management (7.0)
A fairly standard set of call management features are present, including call histories and the ability to quickly dial a number from this history. It’s also easy to send a text message or copy a phone number to a contact from this history: useful if you want to save a number permanently. However, there is no record of the length of individual calls; all you get is an overall timer that shows the length of the last call and a few other timers (total calls plus incoming, outgoing, roaming and data calls).
During a call, the right soft button provides a few options, such as turning on the speakerphone, viewing contacts or accessing the calendar. However, this button is a little close to the call end button: you could easily hang up the call instead of going to your calendar. It would also be nice to have the task program or messaging on this menu, so you could note down things like directions while on a call. You can access these by pressing the home key and selecting the start menu, but that takes a few seconds.
Startup to call (1.41)
The Q is a frustratingly slow cell phone when starting up: it took us an average of 71 seconds to turn the phone on and dial a number (we don’t measure the time to make the call, as that can depend on the network). Much of this time was spent waiting and staring at the screen as it displayed animations and played jaunty little tunes to let us know it was getting there: we’d rather it started up quicker and was a bit less cheerful about it.
Ring Volume (6.6)
Playing back the loudest of the ringbones that we could find installed on the device, the Q managed a volume level of 66 Decibels with the ringer at maximum volume (we measure this from a distance of 4 inches; see here for more details on how we test). That’s not overly loud, but it should be enough to allow you to hear it if the camera is in a pocket.
Ringtone Customizability (8.0)
For your auditory pleasure, the Q supports a wide range of ring tone formats, including MP3 files, MIDI, AAC and iMelody. Ring tones can be downloaded directly to the phone or from memory cards, so if you particularly want your Q to announce incoming calls with the sound of you yelling “answer the phone, you #?&!!!”, feel free to record yourself yelling just that and use it. Just make sure you’re not sitting next to me on the bus when you get a call.
Non Audio Alerts (2.0)
The vibrate feature of the Q is somewhat restrained: the phone barely moves when it is enabled, so you could easily miss calls if it was in a coat pocket or bag. You can, however, set the phone to vibrate and then ring if you don’t answer it within a few seconds (although you can’t set how long it vibrates for, and our test phone from Verizon always seemed to go to voicemail before it started ringing).
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