So at work I’m working on an application that has to run on Windows Mobile 5 smartphones. Long story short, it’s going to make cops’ jobs a little easier (and maybe, just maybe, a certain cop in Marana PD will actually do his job instead of sitting in their cars on yahoo all night waiting for strippers to arrest…seriously man, bust some red-light runners or some drunk drivers or something) and eliminate a paper to computer transfer job that has to be done back at the station. Simply put, more efficient cops. Anyway, for the project, Verizon sent me 2 kinds of phones, the Moto Q and the Xv6700, and Sprint sent me a Treo 700wx to test it on.

Xv6700
So far I like this phone the best. This is a UTStarcom PocketPC phone (also branded as the PPC-6700 on Sprint and Alltel). The sound quality is pristine, and it has a slide-out keyboard with nice big keys (because we all know that people don’t really have thumbs that are less than a square centimeter in shape) that I can type seriously fast on. The only problem with this phone is that the processor is a little bit slow, clocking in at 400 MHz (XScale) it’s a little less zippy than I’m used to, coming from a 624MHz Dell Axim x51v. The slow speed doesn’t bother me too much, it just strikes me as odd that my application loads much faster on the Axim. The EVDO interface is pretty fast too; I haven’t done any formal speed tests, as testing Verizon’s EVDO speeds is beyond the scope of this review, but needless to say it mets my needs. The other con about this phone is that Alltel doesn’t carry it anymore, which really bums me out.

Treo 700wx
This one is the second runner up. I’ve always liked the Treos, even back when they were Palm devices. It has all the nice qualities of the Xv700, but since the processor is a different type (Samsung 300MHz) I can’t really do a speed comparison. I will say it’s comparable in speed to the Xv6700. This phone would be tied for first place except two things. One, the keys on the thumbpad are just too small for most men to manage. I get “fatfinger” errors all the time with this thing (as my girlfriend will attest, seeing some of the atrociously spelled text messages I’ve sent her from Treos) and it can be annoying. It does have the advantage of one-handed text entry if your fingers are small enough for it. The other issue is the square screen. The screen is a 240×240 screen. I really don’t understand this…they could have easily made the phone just a little longer and put in a 320×240 standard PocketPC screen, or at least made it 320×320 like the Palm Treo models. It’s a little disappointing, but the sound quality is great, and this device is a solid performer.

Moto Q
This phone really blows. If Motorola was going to try to make a “budget smartphone” they should have told people this. The voice quality on this phone is terrible compared to the two above phones, and even terrible compared to my Motorola e815 (Alltel). My girlfriend’s T-Mobile sidekick sounds better for voice quality than this unit. This isn’t an issue with the phone, but with Motorola. I’d pay $10 more for the phone to have a quality speaker in it. Maybe they can release a Q “pro edition” for $50 more that has a better speaker and a faster graphics processor/cpu. Which brings me to my next point: the Q has serious problems with page tearing when doing transitions and renders UI elements slowly. If I have a page with 10 text boxes on it and hit the down key 5 times, the phone does not keep up with me. This is terribly annoying, and it happens in Internet Explorer too. I’d have tested Opera if I could have made it run on that toy. The only pro about this phone is that it has the thumbpad built into the front, and typing is a little easier than on the Treo for me because the buttons are more spread out. It does not make up for lacking a touchscreen though; navigating this phone is extremely difficult. Don’t buy this phone until Motorola fixes the bugs!

Verizon also sent me some PN-820 phones, but because they lack a QWERTY keyboard, they never left the box. I just told the client “no” with my laughter.