I originally wrote a glowing review of the Moto Q, followed up by a rather bitter account of what had happened since, and now that I’ve had a working Q for two months without incident I’d like to put in my final word.
I still love the Q, we’ve had a rocky relationship but stuck through the good and the bad, but the effect of the experience has compelled me to recommend anyone against this phone. Not because of the phone itself but because of the uncertainty.
I am living in constant fear it’s going to crater on me again, I have made backups of my contacts and files on the phone so that doesn’t bother me as much as what happens if it craters on me at the end of my warranty? I’m locked into a 3 year contract and Telus doesn’t give you a new warranty every time they swap your phone.
Yes, if your phone dies, you take it to the mobility store, they request another unit and take yours. You don’t get a brand new unit mind you, it’s refurbished, which means you’re receiving someone elses broken unit that has been “fixed.” So it’s a gamble whether you’ll get one that will stay fixed but they don’t give you an extension on your warranty, does that seem right to you?
It doesn’t to me and it makes me angry. I feel foolish for adopting a technology so early, I’ve been burned like this before and I swore I’d never do it again, which is why I am so leery of the new Apple iPhone, though I doubt I’d ever purchase it due to it’s price despite having to lock yourself into a contract ($600 with a 2yr Cingular AT&T contract.)
With that said I’d like to address some stuff that I’ve noticed that repeatedly shows up in my traffic logs
1. You cannot do a hard reset on the Moto Q if you’re running the old firmware. I highly recommend doing a backup and upgrading your firmware from the motorola site as soon as possible. To do a hardware reset if you have the current firmware is, from a powered off state, hold the center action button and press the power button to turn it on, it should then prompt if you wish to do a reset.
2. Problem starting up, if you Q is not freezing on the start up, first thing you should do is try removing the battery. Telus reps usually recommend leaving it out for an hour then trying again, most likely this is not going to do anything but if it does, be happy. If it doesn’t, you’re going to need to do a hard reset (see #1 about that.) Again if you didn’t upgrade your firmware, you need to make a trip down to the mobility dealer, hope you backed up your data cause it’s gone (don’t forget to take out your MiniSD card before handing over your itty bitty brick.)
3. Voice Recognition, as I stated in my first article, is expecting you to talk to it like a person, not a baby. When it prompts you for a command speak to it clearly but as you were talking to someone else. It is also highly recommended you include last names and how you want to contact someone. For example, I want to call Bob Smith on his mobile phone I would say CallBobSmithMobile in one breath, it will better understand that than Call, Bob, Smith, Mobile. Also it is a good idea to imitate the pronounciation that the VR uses, my friend has a last name Barbutza, pronounced Bar-boot-za, but the phone pronounces it how it reads Bar-but-za. Finally if it asks you a Yes/No question wait until you hear the beep before answering otherwise it won’t register a response, this is the most annoying part about it since there is a noticable delay between it asking your a question and when it will start accepting a response. By habit you’ll be half way through your response before it will start accepting, try breaking that habit, this is also the one exception where speaking unnaturally helps, yeeeess works better than yes.
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