Unmaking Motorola's Q 144
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a breakdown of Motorola's Q Phone, looking at the cost of each of its components. From the article:
'It costs Motorola about $158 to build the phone. That includes components and assembly but excludes other expenses such as marketing, distribution, and licensing fees to Microsoft, which makes the phone's Windows Mobile operating system.' By comparaison, the BlackBerry 8700, only costs $123 according to the article. The difference between the two, the BlackBerry 'doesn't play video or music, and unlike the Q, it doesn't have a camera.'"
Screw the Q, give me an A1200 running linux! (Score:1, Interesting)
Image? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google Image Link [google.com]
Clearly, you've ONLY owned a phone (Score:1, Interesting)
I have internet access all the time, everywhere. I can buy from Woot, Ticketmaster, I can read my favorite blogs, and I get to see regular web pages... not just those wimply little itty-bitty text pages made for weenie cell phones.
I have a 1 Gig SD card, and a set of Shure e4c in-ear headphones. I have 900 meg of MP3's which is just perfect for an airplane flight. I store an additional 50 meg of files, and have 50 meg free.
I have instant corporate email (same as a blackberry), along with Outlook calendar and contacts. I can also open and use Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
It's a business tool. I can plug it into my laptop, and use it for internet access for my laptop... 40K throughput is fairly easy to get.
Go ahead. Carry your iPod, your phone, your camera, and all the other junk you seem to want to carry. I'll just carry my Treo... thank you very much.
Re:US Phone Market is so irrelevent (Score:5, Interesting)
There are server-side policies for EVERYTHING. A rep once told a group of us that if we could find any way to get data off a Blackberry that couldn't be stopped/restricted by a policy on the server he'd buy us lunch and get it fixed. In an enterprise environment the admin can restrict everything.
We can (and do) set password policies. Length, age, complexity, number of attempts can all be configured. There's even a distress feature so the device notifies an admin if the user is forced to unlock it (you change your password by one character). The admin could then send a wipe command to the device which completely wipes all data.
It even has AES encrypted storage. If you turn that on, even if you unsolder the memory chip you can't read the data (though you could theoretically proceed to brute-force it).
The lack of cameras on all Blackberries (is a God-send!) is due to the restrictions placed on cameras in senstive areas. If one Blackberry had a camera they may all be banned from those locations (rumor has it there may be one coming though, I hope not).
No MP3s because it's a business first device. I personally don't agree with this one. I wish it would play WAV file voicemail (promised, never delivered). It doesn't have removable storage or even enough for more than a couple songs, but this relates back to the security issue. They can't be used to copy documents from a computer and it's near impossible to remove sensitive data from the device.
It's not perfect, but at least it has a reason.
Digitac
Re:The main difference between them... (Score:5, Interesting)
I, personally, have no issue with battery life other than when I play movies and so forth all day. However, I expect that to drain the battery much faster than normal phone usage drains the average cell phone anyway.
I also don't know why you said the Q doesn't have push Email services. Mine pushes my gmail out to me just fine, and you can also set pocket outlook to poll your email accounts automatically every few minutes if you'd rather do it that way.
Also, I don't have a problem with my unit locking up at all. I often have pocket IE, Outlook, and the media player all going at once, and they seem to get along just fine.
As far as I'm concerned, I got phone with a 400kb internet connection, push email, web browsing, internet streaming, video and music playback, plus whatever other little software I want to install for the cost of a $200 handset and a $50 card. So far it's working out to be a prety good deal.
BTW, check out Qusers.com [qusers.com]for more people with Q's. They can tell you the good (and bad) of their experience.
Re:The main difference between them... (Score:5, Interesting)
- Yeah, I don't like the scrollwheel. I can't get my hand in position to use it and find the D-pad and menu-letter shortcuts to be much faster and 1-hand-friendly.
- I've run it for 4 weeks. No stability issues or crashes. I sync with Exchange and POP frequently, use web search, calendar, make phone calls, etc... fairly normal usage.
- No AKU2, no problem. Every 15-minutes is plenty for me. There is an SMS-based solution to this anyway, supposedly, although I'm not what that requires on the server. It certainly requires free text messages.
- My battery lasts for 2-3 days with ~1 hour of talk time and 15-minute email syncing. I've heard MSN Messenger can run-away when you don't have a data connection... maybe that was it?
- Regarding charging off a computer... why?... you still need to pack a cable anyway. I simply don't use ActiveSync, because I can sync over the air, so I'm not plugging in for that either.
- Regarding build quality, I sort of agree, but it's mainly the battery cover that's at fault. I've read putting some sticky padding between it and the battery will solidify it.
- You never really mention how "most of these problems relate back to Smartphone edition." I switch to tasks in the background by hitting Home and clicking right once (for the most recent app) and clicking the "do it" button. That seems reasonable. I can probably do that faster than the time it takes to whip out the stylus. What do these other problems have to do with Smartphone vs. PocketPC?
Re:The main difference between them... (Score:3, Interesting)
You won't get any argument from me that the Q does more, much more, than the Blackberry. Movies and audio playback are missing from the Blackberry; games and web browsing are better on the Q. Our users have reported complaints about most of those though. One user said it would play several MP3s then stop, another said the web browser was "hit or miss" (sorry, no specifics). From your remark about minimo, I'll assume "very capable web browser" means "leaves much to be desired". I find it to be better than the Blackberry's, bigger than other [smart]phones, but much harder to use than it's PocketPC counterpart.
Removable storage is very nice (even necessary) for audio and video files. I don't remember the exact on-board storage, but it's not enough to do anything useful with alone.
Battery life is no doubt affected by usage scenarios. In our environment the primary function of any handheld is push e-mail. This does have a detrimental effect on battery life, but it is still a fair comparison to Blackberries and Treos on which we also run push e-mail.
I am curious as to what you are using to get e-mail pushed from GMail. To my knowledge, GMail does not support, nor does any 3rd party service implement, push e-mail in any form (from GMail). I suspect it is pull e-mail on a regular, even if frequent, schedule. For some that is perfectly acceptable, but our users demand the instant push e-mail (yes, 60 seconds is too long for some of them). Pocket Outlook supports, as you mention, pull e-mail or SMS-notification e-mail from Exchange (a sudo push system). The push feature I was referring to is the recently released AKU2 update for Windows Mobile 5 devices that supports true push e-mail from Microsoft Exchange 2003 servers.
I would honestly like to know how you switch between Pocket IE, Outlook and the Media Player when all are running. I would love to hear that there is a hidden keystroke somewhere that I'm missing, but to my knowledge the only way to get to a running app is to run it again from the Start menu. Not all programs behave well this way.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are using this in a purely personal environment, not an enterprise environment, right? In this way, I believe it is best compared to the Sidekick, instead of the Blackberry. I cannot comment on it's overall usefulness as a consumer device as we evaluated them for an enterprise environment. As the "Blackberry-killer" that Verizon has been desperately trying to convince us it is, it falls short. Very short.
Digitac
Re:Microsoft License (Score:5, Interesting)
Hardware cost of the mobile phone is nothing compared to all the licensed buzz-words: GSM, UMTS, TDMA, CDMA, etc. That all stuff has to be coded and tested of course: in both hardware and software. Licensing costs for such hardware/software easily run into numbers with 6 (six) and more zeros at the end.
And embedded OSs they use - like Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS - all can easily run into $30-200 per phone. Or you think they started thinking of Linux just for fun?
P.S. Reminds me why GSM won over technically superior CDMA in USA. The only "problem" with CDMA was stupid licensing and patent regime established by Qualcomm and Co (bunch of old companies afraid to be left aside of market.) 3GPP learned the lesson and UMTS had won again over US crowd - mostly due to friendly licensing. More or less all 3G wireless networks deployed around the world are derivatives of european UMTS. Licensing is no simple question to ignore.
P.P.S. Long time ago, one chinese CE manufacterer speculated that to produce $200 Palm PDA they need only about $40. So the numbers in article aren't really surprising.
Re:With open standards you do have choices. (Score:1, Interesting)
If I hadn't encoded four seasons of Futurama and 100 miscellaneous videos to play on it with TCPMP. and have all my
Re:With open standards you do have choices. (Score:1, Interesting)
Nutzoid or not, it is a pervasive expectation in the US that if there is any feature your phone you want help adjusting you can dial 611 and get help with it. That this level of hand holding has the unintended consequence of narrowing the field of handset choices is rarely deduced by the general public.
It's also worth noting y'all have had GSM running much longer over there than we have, so there is a good deal of pressure against a carrier that doesn't support it. It's not quite that way here. The wireless companies in the States chose substantially divergent methods to come out of the analog cellular days, and forcing the GSM carriers to compete more fairly would just give the "Verizons" of the world an advantage (in the short term) in that their phones are technologically locked to their systems.
It would be rather sweet though if UMTS spectrum regulations were to mandate the "unlock when contract has expired" requirement so that at least the 3G generation would have a level playing field.