I aso have a Q, and I must say I quite agree with the (bad) NY Times review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/technology/08pogue.html?ex=1151121600&en=b9d1768c3fe8cf9c&ei=5070
yes, the review mostly gives negative grades to the Smartphone OS, not to the Motorola Q in particular.
in fact the problem is that the Q is a Smartphone, not a Pocket PC, and MSFT until now has assumed that Smartphones have no keyboard and therefore are not "data-oriented", while Pocket PC are "data-oriented".
so MSFT decided that Pocket-Word (i.e. a basic word processor), or even "Note" (to write down quick text notes) should not be provided in the Smartphone bundled apps. Only a "Voice-Note" is included. I think you can view Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents, but you cannot edit them.
also, MSFT makes it impossible to "cut-and-paste" test between applications, or even between various text-fields in an application. i tried to hold shift while moving the text cursor over some text, i.e. the standard way to select text with a keyboard, but that does not work on the Q.
And also it is true that the Smartphone apps are often not well designed. For example, you take a photo, then look at it and decide that you want to delete it: you cannot do that in the menu of the photo viewer, you must go back to the "thumbnail view", and then there is a delete choice in the menu.
another ennoying thing is that WMP does not close files when it is paused and/or deactivated. this means that if you shoot a video, and view it with WMP, then you will have a really hard time to delete it (you will get an error message because WMP has the file opened, if you used it to watch the file).
the complicated workaround is to either kill WMP using the Motorola task manager, because there is still no Exit command in MSFT applications - that is, if you know where the task manager is on the Q - or to go in WMP "Now Playing" and to clear "Now-Playing" from the menu - or simply to reboot the phone by turning it OFF and ON, and go back in the thumbnail view.
talk about making it easy to do simple things like deleting a photo or video you just shot and reviewed!
like they say in the NY Times review, doing even simple things are complicated on Smartphones. It took me a while to figure out how to key-lock the device, how to adjust volume, and how to enter characters that are not on the keyboard - i had to locate the answers to those questions in this excellent Motorola Q wiki (http://www.motoqwiki.com/index.php?title=Motorola_Q_Wiki) ( http://www.motoqwiki.com/index.php?title=Motorola_Q_Wiki ).
another thing that annoys me is that PIE does not have a "Find" command to look for some text in the current page. You often have quite large web pages and you want to locate a particular string in the page, and you have a keyboard, but MSFT does not give you the option. that's lame! BTW the "Find" command is also missing from the Pocket PC version of PIE.
and the InBox (EMail) app, although much better than in earlier Smartphones, is still not great. For example, if you use IMAP4, there is no way to indicate the remote directory (on the server) where your mail folders are located, so IMAP4 will not be usable if your mail folder are located in some sub-folder of your home directory, which is quite common on Unix/Linux servers.
and i did not mention this bug that prevents you from sending email when your SMTP server requires login like '
[email protected]' (http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11518). that effectively prevented me from using my regular SMTP server. of course you can use web-base mail like gmail, but the Email client application is supposed to work better that web-based mail, isn't it?
so yes, the Q is a nice piece of hardware, very slim, very sexy, with good battery life, fast network connection (at least with Verizon), fast processor, nice QVGA display, very good with video and audio (can play full-screen video at 30 fps with TCPMP and PocketTV) but the bundle software (i.e. Smartphone OS) is still not yet good enough, and that's too bad.
I think if you want a phone with a keyboard, a Pocket PC would work much better - too bad Pocket PC Phones are much larger and more expensive, and usually have a shorter battery life. the Q is much cheaper, much smaller, and it would be perfect if it was a Pocket PC, not a Smartphone.
well, that's my feeling after using it for 2 weeks...