Motorola announced the Q last July with a first quarter shipping target. We are six weeks from the end of that quarter and the phone is still a press photograph, which is starting to look less like a slip and more like something being waited on.
My guess is Microsoft. The Q runs Windows Mobile 5.0 in its non-touch Smartphone form, and the push email support that would let it credibly stand next to a BlackBerry is not in the version shipping today. It is coming as a feature pack. If you are Motorola and your entire enterprise pitch rests on email arriving without the user asking for it, launching before that lands means launching into a review cycle where every single writeup says the BlackBerry does the main thing better. I would wait too.
What that reveals is the uncomfortable structural position Motorola has put itself in. This is a hardware company whose flagship business device cannot ship until a software vendor finishes a component, on that vendor’s schedule, with no ability to accelerate it. RIM does not have this problem because RIM built the whole stack, and the reason RIM is hard to attack has very little to do with the handset. It is the infrastructure sitting between the handset and the mail server, which nobody else owns and which everybody keeps trying to route around.
The device itself looks genuinely good, which is the frustrating part. A shade over a centimetre thick with a real QWERTY keyboard underneath a landscape screen is a considerably nicer object than anything RIM has produced, and the design lineage from the Razr is obvious and deliberate. Motorola has understood that people will carry a work phone they are not embarrassed by.
I am less sure about the landscape screen on a non-touch device. You navigate this thing with a thumbwheel on the side, and a wide short screen with a wheel is an interaction model nobody has done well yet.
The cost of the delay is not the delay. It is that a device announced in July 2005 and shipped in the middle of 2006 gets judged against whatever else arrives in the middle of 2006, and nobody grades on the curve of when you first showed it. Every month this sits unshipped, the Q gets a little less remarkable while doing nothing wrong.
If it arrives in April as Motorola now seems to be suggesting, with push email working properly, it is the best Windows Mobile device anyone has made. If it arrives in June without it, they have built a very attractive phone for a job it cannot quite do.