[Fandysilalahi]

A heavy Blackberry user bought the motorola Q8

For all you guys with raised eyebrows after readin the first sentence, here is my explanation.
I bought the Q for my mum, because:
1. She's a heavy phone/txt user (basically that's all a cell phone is to her), and I think having a handset with a qwerty keyboard will likely enhance her TXTing experience
2. A new Q is being offered at $150, here in indonesia, that is at least a $100 cheaper than a used, grey market bb 8310 curve.
3. Although I think that maximum thumbing experience can only be properly experienced with BB's keyboards; paying for the BB's monthly dataplan would be a waste, because my mum will never use all those fancy data communication anyway (remember, phones are only for calling&texting according to my mum).

Disclaimer:
The writer of this review will try his best to make this review as unbiased and fair as possible. He'll try to check his prejudices at the door, and limit "Q vs BB" comparisons only on intellectually comparable aspects of the phones.
Therefore I will limit the covictions only to the areas of the phone that my mum will likely use.

Living with the Q, day 1

The first thing I noticed when I powered on the Q8 was the screen. It's large, but the display is not as well defined (sharp) as I have come to expect (at least not as good as BB screens). To be fair, it is bright, and the contrast is good. A major plus for the screen is it's ability to display extra large fonts (including inside the txt messaging menu), which is very beneficial since it will allow my mum to operate it without the assistance of reading glasses. Overall, I must say that its pretty good.

The second thing I noticed as I started to press the start key to open up the program list, was the amount of lag, not much, but its enough to be noticeable.

The box and packaging is good, the Q comes with quite a few number of standard accessories including a nice leather Holster (but no handsfree).

Living with the Q day 2

I found that the interface takes a bit of gettin used to, but that's normal for any electronics nowadays, I think. Although it takes me a bit longer to get accustomed to compared to when I used a BB for the first time.

Another thing that I noticed from the user interface, and thus, the OS in general, is the rather large amount of button pressing required to get around even the most basic stuffs such as, changing the wallpaper, switching between my txt inbox/outbox, locking/unlocking the keypad, etc.

I also noticed how the Q takes a long time to get rid of the closed programs' icons from the home screen. This happens even though I've used the task manager to kill the running apps in question.

Still on the interface, I was kinda disturbed by the absence of the questionmark sign from the standard keyboard mapping. I had to pull out the "insert extra character" menu by pressing the
right shift button twice and then go thru the list to find the question mark, and click it.

Today I also tried to "test drive" the Q's keyboard, and here's what I found:

Pros:
The buttons are well sized and spaced. It really helps to reduce my typos.
Another thing that I like about the keyboard is the presence of an ample "click" when u press on them. This provides a good tactile feedback, and, induces confidence to keep typing faster and faster. A great improvement over the "dead" and flat buttons found on Nokias E71 and my late dad's E90.

One other plus for the keyboard is its ease to be operated by one hand (which is close to impossible on the BB; although this is due to the BB keyboard being optimized for a "multi touch" approach; which they deliver excellently).

Now, we go to the cons of the Q8's the keyboard:

Although it provides a proper amount of tactile feed-back (that boosted my confidence to type faster and faster), after a while, my thumbs got sore from pressing it (I'm not talkin about the kinda "thumb fatigue" that BB users experience). pressing the buttons put pain on my thumbs after typing at least 50 words.

The OS's rather laggy response (to my standard) resulted in the Q skipping letters as I type faster.
So, that actually counters the advantage of the increased confidence that I get from its proper tactile feedback.

Verdict: overall the keyboard is a solid performer; although, you won't find me typing a 200 word length essay on these babies.

That's it for now,
More report coming soon.