The Q is Motorola’s attempt to prove it is more than a fashion house, and the most interesting thing about it is how clearly it demonstrates the opposite.
On the outside it is exactly what you would hope for. Eleven and a half millimetres, a proper QWERTY keyboard, the same anodised finish and precise little keys that made the Razr an object rather than a phone. Next to a BlackBerry it looks like it arrived from a decade further on. Motorola’s industrial design group remains the best in the business and the Q is more evidence for it.
Inside it is Windows Mobile 5, which Motorola did not write and cannot fix. So the device that looks like the future runs a smartphone operating system built around a stylus, on a phone with no stylus, navigated by a five way pad through menus designed for a much larger screen. The mismatch is not subtle after twenty minutes of use.
This is the trap Motorola has walked into and I do not think the company has recognised it as a trap. Building a smartphone means owning software. RIM owns its software, which is why a BlackBerry does the four things a corporate user needs faster than anything else can. Nokia owns Symbian and S60, and while S60 is genuinely irritating, it is Nokia’s irritation to fix. Palm owns its operating system. Motorola has licensed one, which means its most sophisticated product is a chassis around somebody else’s decisions.
Look at what the company has shipped this year and the pattern is hard to miss. A Razr, a thinner Razr, a Razr in more colours, the Pebl, the Slvr, the Krzr, and now the Q. Seven products, one design language, no software strategy. Every one of them is beautiful and every one of them stops being interesting the moment you press a key twice.
The enterprise market Motorola is aiming the Q at is the least forgiving place to arrive with somebody else’s operating system. Corporate buyers do not buy on how a device looks, they buy on whether it integrates with the mail server, whether IT can manage it centrally, and whether the thing works identically on the two hundredth handset as on the first. RIM has spent a decade building exactly that and it is not a feature list, it is infrastructure.
What Motorola actually has is the best hardware group in the industry attached to no platform. That was fine while phones were phones. The direction of travel is a device where the software is the product and the metal is packaging, and in that world a company with a superb design team and a licensing agreement is in real trouble.
Buy the Q if you want a Windows Mobile device and you care what it looks like, because it is comfortably the best looking one available. Just be clear that you are buying Motorola’s hardware and Microsoft’s decisions, and that when the second annoys you, the first cannot help.