Motorola Q: Equine Excrement

A little over a year ago, I underwent an utterly hellish process to stay loyal to Sprint and get a Motorola Q.  One day, I may document this on the blog, but not today.  I have all the e-mails saved, and the memory of the multitudes of phone calls with incompetent, undertrained, ineffective "customer" "service" "agents" will be forever seared into my memory...  I imagine that if I ever get Alzheimer's and forget my own name I will still remember the pain that this process caused.

You would think that enduring that kind of pain would net something worthy of the process.  Unfortunately, after a long year of continued frustration and just astonished, flabbergasted bewilderment, I now find it necessary to document all the ills of this phone.  I don't know if these problems are Motorola's fault, Sprint's fault, or Microsoft's fault, but frankly, I don't give a damn.  The phone is the technological equivalent of equine excrement, and every day it surprises me in some new way.  90% of the stress in my day comes from traffic, but the remaining 10% comes from my having to use the Motorola Q.

• First off, the hardware...  about the only good thing I can say about this phone is that it is built fairly solidly.  I've dropped it a couple of times and it's held up well.  Plus, the sexy black rubberized-for-your-pleasure finish is not only aesthetically pleasing but also functions to assist in grip.
• There is a set of maladies which I would like to characterize as "poor battery life," but that doesn't even begin to tell the story.  In fact, it's kind of misleading, because on a brand new battery, it was acceptable.  That is to say, on a full charge when the battery and phone were brand new, I could go an entire day with a little surfing, a little talking on the phone, and some SMS messages without having to worry too much.  Unfortunately, within 6 months, the battery life began to drop noticeably.  I am a fucking battery hound, period.  I am so anal about my batteries that I have a spreadsheet to track the charge that goes into each and every NiMH battery that I own (I have a special charger that lets me cycle each battery fully on every charge and track the energy put into every individual cell).  So don't tell me about how to properly take care of batteries.  My last phone, a Samsung Palm device, was still holding charge on its battery at a level indistinguishable from brand new 3 years later.  On the Q now, if I make it through a whole day without getting a low battery warning, I go and buy a lottery ticket because it's my fucking lucky day.
• What's even more frustrating is that the phone will literally turn itself off as if the battery died for no reason whatsoever, randomly.  I can be sitting there with 3 bars (out of 4) on the batt indicator, and five minutes later, I look at my phone, and it's fucking taking a personal day.  When I power it back on, it comes up with a random number of bars.  Sometimes, it's 3 like before it turned itself off, sometimes it gives me a low battery warning with 0 bars.  What a piece of junk.  I'd pick up a spare battery, but I refuse to give Motorola more money for a defective product.
• The "flash" on the camera must be short for "flashlight" because it is not a "flash" in the photographic sense of the word.
  
• Software-wise, it's just unbelievably buggy.  They couldn't even get something as fundamental as dialing right.  When you're on the "home" screen and press a number, it is supposed to put you into dialing mode.  The numbers you press show up at the top, and simultaneously, it brings up possible matches for the letters underneath out of your address book.  This is pretty standard for any mobile phone since, oh, I dunno...  1990?  But no, not on the Q.  Right now, as I type this rant, if I hit any number or letter from the "home" screen, what do I get?  My fucking calendar.
• Also, there is an entire friggin' qwerty keyboard on this phone.  You'd think you'd be able to dial 1-800-MOTO-SUX but no.  You have to translate the letters yourself and then dial the numbers.  How hard would it have been to include some "letter dialing" mode?  I mean, I don't even need it to be automatic.  I'd be fine with having to press alt- or shift- or whatever.  But no.  Nothing.
• Don't even get me started on IE.
• ActiveSync is neither active nor does it sync.  It is a royal pain in the ass to use, and frankly I doubt that 99% of people who don't have professional IT support have ever sync'd their Q's to their Windows machine.  And if you want to sync over Bluetooth, you might as well hit any number or letter on your Q to bring up your calendar so you can cancel your appointments for the next three days because that's how long it'll take you to figure that shit out.

I'll continue to post the misadventures I have with this phone, which I am convinced must be standard issue in Purgatory.  After all, I am locked into this contractually for another year thanks to the orifices which are the telcos.  But as long as I have to put up with this crap I might as well get my word in edgewise on it.