Motorola Q Cell Phone Review - Messaging
|
Richard Baguley Published on March 08, 2007 Comment on this |
|
|
|
|
Supported Email Services (9.0)
Support is provided for POP3 and IMAP email servers, plus Hotmail The first two are through the built-in version of Outlook, while Hotmail is supported through the version of Pocket MSN included on the Q. There is no built-in support for AOL Mail or other services.
Push Email (3.0)
The only push email service that is directly supported on the Q is Microsoft Exchange. This would be fine if your company or ISP runs an Exchange server, but the Q would be a bad pick if they run something else (such as the Blackberry Enterprise Server or Lotus Notes).
Multiple Email Accounts (4.0)
Up to 5 email accounts can be accessed through the Q; that’s much less than the 10 that BlackBerry devices offer, but enough for most users.
HTML and Attachments (7.0)
The built-in outlook email client supports viewing emails in HTML format, although complex HTML doesn’t come out well, and images are not displayed by default. Other types of attachments (such as PDF, Word and Excel files) can be displayed in the file viewer program, which is automatically launched when you click on the attachment. Attachments are not downloaded by default: you have to select them for download and then select send/receive from the menu again to get them.
Email Customization (4.0)
The outlook messaging client does not provide much in the way of customizability: you can’t change the font or text size used to display the email in the message list, which only shows 4 messages on one screen. The only customization you get is to decide if the program shows the time and date of the email and adding signatures to outgoing messages. Avid mailers will find this to be a serious limitation; they need to be able to see large numbers of emails at once.
Time to New Message (3.92)
Getting to the point where we could write a new message from the home page took us an average of 5.1 seconds. However, if you use the messaging program a lot, it appears on the list of commonly used programs at the top of the screen, which cuts this down to an impressively quick 4 seconds. There is also a dedicated button on the keyboard which takes you into the messaging application: from there, you just have to select the account you want to use and select new message from the menu: a process that take on average 4 seconds again.
Email Usability (5.0)
The email features of the Q are basic, but adequate. This is no Blackberry: it would not be suitable for those who send or receive lots of email and need to keep track of this. But for the odd casual email while waiting for the bus, the Q has the basics you need.
Supported IM Services (2.0)
MSN messenger is the only IM service supported by the Q out of the box. However, other services can be supported using the downloadable clients (or a multi-service IM client such as Agile Messenger.
MMS Support (7.0)
In our tests, the Q had no problems sending still images and short videos as MMS messages. Presets for MMS are included in both the camera and video features of the Q.
Smiley Face Interpretation (0.0)The Q failed the vital smiley face test: our test smilies weren’t rendered as smilies, but just as text, and there’s no way to easily insert smiley faces: you have to type them yourself. This might be acceptable for a business user, but serious texters might find this a real problem.
SMS / MMS Ease of Use (5.0)
Sending SMS messages is as easy as sending emails, because you use the same program. This makes sending and receiving text messages a pretty straightforward process; messages can be sent to several people at once and it is simple to reply to messages. However, there is no threaded view, which makes it a little difficult to keep track of conversations.
Time to New Message (1.96)
Getting to the point where we could write a new SMS message from the home page took us an average of 5.1 seconds. However, if you use the messaging program a lot, it appears on the list of commonly used programs at the top of the screen, which cuts this down to a speedy 4 seconds.
| Previous Next | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
