While RIM was settling its BlackBerry patent litigation with NTP, Motorola has been hard at work on its new Q smartphone running the Windows Mobile operating system.
Recent reports say Motorola will ship the new Q smartphone sometime in April.
On a road trip to Chicago, your correspondent has observed at least two samples of the Moto Q in the wild, going through heavy friendly user testing.
Company sources tell The Wired GC that the Moto Q will likely be available “in a month.” It’s not clear which month, but I’m guessing May is more likely than April at this point. Verizon has the exclusive for some period of time.
I’ll do a more detailed review later. Suffice it to say that the Moto Q is awesome–light in the hand, thin but solid, with a screen to die for. The integration with Verizon’s EV-DO mobile broadband service is excellent. Fast and fun. And the fact that most law firms and companies use Microsoft Exchange Server could make the total cost of deployment and operation very attractive for bottom-line oriented IT managers.
Some mobile industry commenters have taken Motorola to task for taking too long to release the Q. I think this is a “measure twice, cut once” thing. For the corporate markets that Motorola and Verizon are targeting, it just has to work out of the box, with no excuses. RIM has a serious toehold in the legal market.
But with Motorola, Microsoft and Verizon on the case, I bet there’s a Q in the future of many lawyers.