The Moto Q marks Motorola's entry into the highly-eompetitive PDA cell phone market. The company has earlier tried getting into this market via their A series of phones (Moto Ming), but failed to garner any footing. For the Moto Q, Motorola has gone with the tried-and-tested design for a QWERTY phone. It is wide but well proportioned, and therefore feels much better to hold when compared with Nokia's E61/61i. Lessons learnt from the RAZR have been used to good effect on the Moto Q; the phone is slim for a PDA phone.

Finished in jet black, the exterior has a rubberised feel, and the body offers excellent grip. Except for the navigational D-pad, all the buttons are flat and at times difficult to press. The QWERTY keypad offers excellent tactile feedback and equals that of those on high-end PDAs such as those from Blackberry and Palm. The 320 x 240, 2.4-inch, 65K colour screen seems dated; the Nokia E61 has had a 16 million colour screen for a long time. The Moto Q has an anaemic 40 MB of internal memory, which can be augmented via the bundled 1 GB mini SD card.

The Moto Qruns on Windows Mobile 6, and the user interface is zippy. By default, the Moto Q uses Motorola's theme, but we prefer the Windows theme. The Today screen can be customised to show events such as meetings and birthdays, as well as emails and text messages. The "Documents To Go" application comes preinstalled, and it's great; it ably handles Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and ZIP files. A default Windows me manager helps browsing the device effectively. System tools include a memory manager and a task manager. (The task manager is useful for when you need to know about background processes and kill them.)

Multimedia features are mediocre; Windows Media Player can be used for MP3s and video. The 1.3MP camera is strictly okay; the photographs are passable, and video capture is jerky. Connectivity options include USB, Bluetooth, IR, GPRS, and EDGE. Motorola has been generous with the bundle: a portable adapter, a good-quality leather pouch, a headset, the USB cable, the 1 GB miniSD card, and two batteries. The higher-eapacity battery is fatter and requires a different battery cover, which also comes bundled. Rs 17,325 is expensive for the hardware on offer.The Nokia E61i with WiFi and better multimedia features is available for less.

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