{"id":14028,"date":"2012-11-13T10:18:10","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T16:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=14028"},"modified":"2013-02-07T14:19:53","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T20:19:53","slug":"review-motorola-photon-q-brings-the-qwerty-love-to-sprint-lte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/column\/review-column\/review-motorola-photon-q-brings-the-qwerty-love-to-sprint-lte\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Motorola Brings QWERTY Expertise To Sprint With Photon Q"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/p>\n Motorola has long been one of the strongest Android phone makers. While Samsung may get higher numbers and HTC a bit more of the mind share, Motorola’s original Droid for Verizon is arguably the phone that made Android take off as more than just “not iPhone.” The line is so successful that many users dub all Android phones Droids, a la Band-Aid or Kleenex, and Verizon has embraced that by calling almost all of its Android phones just that, as Verizon has the license from LucaAarts, not Motorola. Now a division of Google, Motorola may not have had a Nexus phone or the ability to put straight Android on without modifications<\/a>, but the company is absolutely a force to be reckoned with. On Verizon.<\/p>\n Off of Verizon, it feels like there’s a distinct lack of choice. For example, if you want a 4G LTE phone from Android, your choices are exactly one device. The Motorola Photon Q<\/a> is a kind-of-sort-of update to the Motorola Photon, the previous only 4G Motorola phone on Sprint. The Photon Q keeps the angles of the original Photon, but throws in a full QWERTY slider similar to the Droid 4 from Verizon. At first, the Photon Q was in fact the only phone on Sprint’s LTE network with a physical keyboard, but \u00a0LG’s\u00a0Mach<\/a>\u00a0came out on November 11 to keep it company. With a $199 price tag compared to the Mach’s $99, and with Motorola’s proven Android track record, isn’t the Photon Q the obvious choice? Let’s find out.<\/p>\n I never got a chance to really mess with the previous Photon, but I was impressed by the little I saw and the users I know who did get to use the phone love it. The Photon Q’s name instantly makes me think of that user satisfaction, as well as that of another phone that users were less satisfied with, the Motorola Q. For the unfamiliar, the Q was a portrait QWERTY Windows Phone device, aimed at the Blackberry set. It annoyingly lacked of a touchscreen just as touch was going big and was stuck with an already-dying OS. What it did have going for it was that it was fairly stylish for the era.<\/p>\nFirst Impressions<\/h3>\n