THE MOTOROLA Q9H IS A GREAT COMMUNICA tor. With its excellent voice performance and keyboard and better-than-usual browser, this smartphone will keep you in touch-whether via voice, e-mail, or Web. A slab-style handset, the Q9h isn't all that small at 4.7 by 2.6 by 0.5 inches, but it's relatively attractive in black with silver accents. It has a 2.4-inch 320-by-240-pixel dis¬play with an ambient light sensor that adjusts brightness dynami¬cally. I found the screen easily readable both indoors and out. The best physical feature, though, is the keyboard.

With its RAZRZline, Motorola reestablished industry superiority in voice quality, and the Q9h is a worthy follow-up. The Q9h doesn't aggressively cancel background noise, but voices came through just fine on my tests. Signal strength was good as well. The Q9h uses Nuance's excellent VoiceSignal voice dialing and command suite, which works over Bluetooth headsets. I couldn't test wired headset performance, though, because unlike retail models, my Q9h didn't come with an adapter for the microSD headset/charging/syncing jack.

The powerful speaker also helps the Q9h excel as a music player. It syncs with and supports the usual Windows Media Player formats, playing music through either its booming mono speaker, a wired headset used with an adapter, or (somewhat muddily) a Bluetooth headset. Video performance was a bit spot- tier. Videos on the Q9h played in full screen, but stuttered occasionally, and I got relatively low frame rates on my CorePlayer video benchmark tests. The 330-MHz ARMll TI OMAP2420 processor felt snappy enough in other apps, so I think it's a video problem. Video and music can be stored in the Q9h's roomy 132MB of onboard memory or on a microSD card tucked into a convenient slot on the side. My 4GB Kingston card worked fine.

Like HTC with the HTC Touch, Motorola, with the Q9h, is taking a stab at fixing Windows Mobile's flaws-which in this case means replacing substandard Microsoft applications with superior third-party apps. The Q9h defaults to the Opera Mobile browser, which renders pages more truly than Microsoft's Pocket Internet Explorer. The DataViz Documents To Go Microsoft Office suite lets you create new Word and Excel documents, which Microsoft's own programs don't allow. The app also han¬dles very complex Power Point and PDF documents.

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The 2-megapixel camera is inconsistent: Photos taken in our simulated daylight lab looked clear and well balanced, but I saw blur in low-light photos, and shots taken outdoors during daytime overexposed the bright areas. The video mode takes small but smooth 176-by-l44 videos at 15 frames per second. The Q9h is less expensive and more pocketable, making it a fit competitor for the Blackberry Curve 8300, especially for folks looking to edit Microsoft Office documents or use a phone as a modem.