In the past I wrote about my Sony Walkman phone. During the last 3 months I have been using the Motorola Q at work. Incidentally, this is my first Windows Mobile cell phone experience. I have to say that while the comparison here is between an apple and an orange, I will focus on the usability features of both phones, rather than the fancier features like the camera or the music player.

Part of the problem with Microsoft is they seem to have taken the usual Windows route in their mobile OS as well - pack in lots of features with software of fairly average quality - and hope to improve the “user experience” as they get feedback and improve over releases. The Q, with service provided by Sprint, tends to fail me at the most inopportune moments. I have had issues of “phone freeze”, very slow response times, and the lack of features in the phone such as Copy and Paste. On the other hand, the voice recognition feature is quite good although the text-to-voice translation produces unintelligible sounds. Some program, like Google Maps, work very poorly. Now I realize the blame probably lies with Google for designing such a poor user interface, but somehow I also feel that they are constrained by the design of the hardware and the operating system.

All in all, I ‘m quite satisfied with the performance. I just wish the screen size were bigger and I had fewer menu options to choose from to accomplish things. And please, for heaven’s sake, give me a Copy and Paste feature. I so miss it!