The Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE: Power Packed With A Physical Keyboard
The Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE is a smartphone that is made to give power users that need a physical keyboard the true power specs they deserve. Before the Photon Q most new phones with a physical keyboards were low-end entry devices that were given just enough hardware to run but there was nothing premium about. The Photon Q changes that concept and you’ll notice it right away with its bright 4.3 inch qHD display with a 256ppi giving sharp and vibrant colors. Internally you get great hardware to power it with a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage with support for a Micro SD card up to 32 GB. It’s a global ready phone with 4G LTE as well so when Sprint activates LTE in your area you’ll get the fast speeds that Verizon and AT&T users have enjoyed. The highlight of the devices is of course the 5-row physical QWERTY keyboard. If you have used the DROID 4 before then you will be familiar with the keyboard. Motorola has mastered the slid-out keyboard and its one of the best with responsive keys and tactile feel. Motorola really didn’t skimp on the hardware here and it shows.
While most aspects of the hardware is good there is couple of issues with the phone that are just puzzling. First, while the Photon Q runs Android 4.0 with very little skinning, it feels very laggy and not hardware optimized. Its something that software update can easily fix but that lag is noticeable enough to bother you during daily usage and needs to be fix soon since the DROID RAZR M runs similar specs and no software lag. Also the camera is just average as most Motorola cell phone cameras are. Good enough to take pics to upload to Facebook and such but nothing special. Motorola really needs to step it up in this department because Samsung, HTC, Apple and Nokia all have better camera technology in their phones.
Even with those couple of shortcomings the Photon Q is a great phone to recommend to the user that needs that physical keyboard. It gives great power and hardware quality while having a decent enough software experience (that needs a hardware optimization update) to please most users.
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