The Motorola Photon Q, a Sprint exclusive, has a slide-out keyboard. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired
Smartphones with physical keyboards are a dying breed. But if you’re a fan of these QWERTY-keyed sliders, you’ve got to applaud Motorola. Nobody is footing a larger share of the smartphone keyboard’s life support bills than Mr. Moto.
In February, the Google-owned Motorola delivered the Droid 4 on Verizon — a solid handset with a great keyboard, but sadly a less-than-stellar display. And now Motorola has dropped the Photon Q 4G LTE, a keyboard-equipped Android phone, available exclusively to Sprint customers for $200 on contract.
Sadly, just as with the Droid 4, the Photon Q feels like it’s lagging in comparison to today’s top-of-the-line Android handsets, particularly at the $200 price point. The crummy screen and the device’s slow performance are the biggest problems, but there are enough additional downsides here that I can only recommend the Photon Q to existing Sprint customers who absolutely insist on using a physical keyboard.
It’s a shame the Photon Q isn’t a better device. After all, Motorola isn’t facing much serious competition in the Android-with-QWERTY realm, outside of the T-Mobile MyTouch Q and the latest Android-powered T-Mobile SideKick 4G, (now more than a year old).
On the inside, the Photon Q is slightly more spritely than the Droid 4, with a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor instead of a 1.2GHz chip. Both handsets pack 1GB of RAM. This looks fine on paper, but in testing, the Photon Q always felt sluggish. It was never as responsive or as fast as I wanted it to be, especially when compared to other $200 handsets I’ve tested this year, such as Samsung’s Galaxy S III and HTC’s One X. Even the $100 Motorola Atrix HD, which has the same Snapdragon CPU and 1GB of RAM inside, is faster and more impressive.
The Photon Q also comes with just 8GB of storage, which is a ridiculously small amount of space once you’ve loaded up on apps and games, and after you’ve shot a month’s worth of photos and videos with the 8-megapixel rear camera. Just about every other $200 phone on the market includes 16GB of on-board storage. It’s the industry-wide standard now, and anything less is inexcusable. There’s a MicroSD card slot for up to 32GB of additional storage, but MicroSD cards are, of course, sold separately.
My biggest gripe of all is with the display: it’s simply not good enough. The Photon Q’s 4.3-inch touchscreen has a “qHD” resolution of just 960 x 540 pixels. This feels like a cut corner — Motorola, I know you can make a better display than this. Again, I point to Motorola’s own $100 Atrix HD, which has an iPhone-rivaling 1280 x 720-pixel display of indisputable beauty. The Photon Q’s lower-resolution “ColorBoost” LCD screen is bright, and the colors are slightly oversaturated, but still attractive. And it’s actually one of the better-looking qHD displays I’ve seen, but the low resolution results in everything looking cluttered and cramped. With dozens of HD games sitting in Google Play waiting for download, and with Netflix and Hulu (and everyone else) capable of streaming videos at 720p or better, shipping a $200 phone with a display this low-res is just silly.
The Q is 0.54 inches thick. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired