Smartphones with earthy keyboards are a failing breed. But if you're a air blower of these QWERTY-keyed sliders, you've got to extol Motorola. Nobody is balance a incomparable share of the smartphone keyboard's life encouragement bills than Mr. Moto.
In February, the Google-owned Motorola delivered the Droid 4 on Verizon - a plain handset with a great keyboard, but sadly a less-than-stellar display. And right away Motorola has forsaken the Photon Q 4G LTE , a keyboard-equipped Android phone, existing to one side to Sprint customers for $200 on contract.
Sadly, only as with the Droid 4, the Photon Q feels similar to it's lagging in more aged to today's top-of-the-line Android handsets, quite at the $200 cost point. The crummy shade and the device's slow opening are the greatest problems, but there are sufficient extra downsides here that we can only suggest the Photon Q to existing Sprint customers who surely demand on using a earthy keyboard.
It's a tarnish the Photon Q isn't a improved device. After all, Motorola isn't confronting ample major contest in the Android-with-QWERTY realm, outward of the T-Mobile MyTouch Q and the ultimate Android-powered T-Mobile SideKick 4G , (now more than a year old).
On the inside, the Photon Q is somewhat more spritely than the Droid 4, with a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor instead of a 1.2GHz chip. Both handsets fill up 1GB of RAM. This looks excellent on paper, but in testing, the Photon Q always felt sluggish. It was never as manageable or as swift as we longed for it to be, especially when compared to other $200 handsets I've tested this year, such as Samsung's Milky Way S III and HTC's One X . Even the $100 Motorola Atrix HD , that has the same Snapdragon CPU and 1GB of RAM inside, is faster and more impressive.
The Photon Q moreover comes with only 8GB of storage, that is a idiotically tiny amount of space once you've installed up on apps and games, and after you've shot a month's value of photos and videos with the 8-megapixel back camera. Just about every other $200 phone on the marketplace includes 16GB of on-board storage. It's the industry-wide typical now, and anything reduction is inexcusable. There's a MicroSD card container for up to 32GB of extra storage, but MicroSD cards are, of course, sole separately.
My greatest dispute of all is with the display: it's simply not great enough. The Photon Q's 4.3-inch touchscreen has a "qHD" fortitude of only 960 x 540 pixels. This feels similar to a cut dilemma - Motorola, we know you can make a improved manifestation than this. Again, we indicate to Motorola's own $100 Atrix HD, that has an iPhone-rivaling 1280 x 720-pixel manifestation of undoubted beauty. The Photon Q's lower-resolution "ColorBoost" LCD shade is bright, and the colors are somewhat oversaturated, but still attractive. And it's obviously one of the better-looking qHD displays I've seen, but the low fortitude results in all seeking cluttered and cramped. With dozens of HD games sitting in Google Play watchful for download, and with Netflix and Hulu (and everybody else) able of streaming videos at 720p or better, shipping a $200 phone with a manifestation this low-res is only silly.
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