I work for a company where almost everyone carries some type of mobile smart device with them. The vast majority carry a BlackBerry and we are on a corporate Verizon plan. I would say that over the passed few months, a lot of my coworkers have switched from their BlackBerry 7250 or BlackBerry 7130e devices to the Motorola Q. Is there a trend starting?

Now, I should point out, I don’t work for a small company and I am not talking about just a few people here and there that have dropped their BlackBerrys for the Motorola Q. I have seen dozens of folks that have carried BlackBerry devices for years make the switch, most of whom admit that the Q is not as reliable as the BlackBerry, however, they have no intentions of coming back and almost all say that the Q isn’t that bad.

What I have been hearing is that the Motorola Q reboots every know and then, but, other than that it is a pretty sleek device. The question that I asked almost everyone that I know who has switched to the Q from a BlackBerry was “Why did you switch?”, and as though everyone who had a Q on their hip had been subliminally programed to say the exact same thing, the answers came down to two responses, at almost the same clip:

  1. I wanted a cameraphone that I could get my email on.
  2. I wanted a new device and I don’t like keyboard with two letters on one button (SureType)

I should note that about a third of these folks gave both responses.

The second answer tells me that a lot of my coworkers wouldn’t have switched if the Blackberry 8703e had been available around the same time that the Q hit the street, however, having a camera phone was important to the majority of them.

By the By…
The push based email on the Q is not bad at all. You can send and recieve email just like on a BlackBerry and you are able to pull down the GAL (Global Address Book) which had been my major reason for not using Windows Mobile in the passed.

Motorola Q, Windows Mobile 5.0, Verizon