The Motorola Q9h is a great communicator. 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 display with an ambient light sensor that adjusts brightness dynamically. I found the screen easily readable both indoors and out. The best physical feature, though, is the keyboard. The keys are domed, raised, slightly grippy, and provide adequate click—much better than any other AT&T device.

With its RAZR² line, Motorola reestablished industry superiority in voice quality, and the Q9h is a worthy follow-up. Voice calls on both AT&T's EDGE and its 3G networks sound fine, especially 3G calls, which are deep, well-rounded, and clear. The volume, especially on the speakerphone, can knock your socks off, without your ever experiencing distortion. 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 spottier. 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 ARM11 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 handles very complex PowerPoint and PDF documents.

Along with those two excellent applications (purchased separately, they'd run you $55) buyers can pick one of three Q Paks. Each pack has five apps: the Road Warrior pack features WorldMate and Zagat To Go; the Household CEO pack includes Zagat, Sudoku, and a recipe app; the Fun Seeker pack has four games and MyStrands, a social-networking/music-discovery service. These are real programs, not just trials.

The Q9h connects to the Internet using AT&T's HSDPA 3G network; when it's roaming globally, it drops down to EDGE. There's no Wi-Fi option. On tests as a USB modem for a Windows XP PC, the Q9h posted relatively mediocre 3G speeds, ranging from about 400 to700 Kbps for downloads—a surprising result, given that it works on the relatively fast HSDPA 3.6 standard. I've gotten speeds over a megabit on other HSDPA 3.6 devices.

For messaging, the Q9h comes with the typical Windows Mobile e-mail client, which supports POP3/IMAP, Windows Live, and Yahoo! e-mail, delivering full HTML e-mail messages. Cingular's Xpress Mail add-on bundles a somewhat unreliable "push" component. There's a basic AIM/Yahoo!/Windows Live IM client as well, along with text and picture messaging inboxes.

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-144 videos at 15 frames per second.

The Q9h's built-in GPS works with the $10-per-month TeleNav service, which delivers driving directions by voice, lets you enter addresses by voice or text, and incorporates live traffic information. The free Google Maps wouldn't run on my evaluation unit, though, so it's unclear if other GPS apps will have access to location information.

The Q9h doesn't quite have the power of our Editors' Choice Windows Mobile phone—the AT&T Tilt from HTC—which folds in Wi-Fi, global high-speed 3G, and better video performance for a truly luxurious smartphone experience. But 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.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 37 minutes

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