by John Paul on Tue Jan 09, 2007 5:32 pm
A friend of mine is director of product development for Motorola. I was on the phone with him today, and this phone came up. He has known about it, of course, for some time - although he hasn't seen all the specs yet. He was impressed with the design and some of the features (Apple is definitely good at the wow factor in their design), but he brought up a few minor concerns and one major one. I won't go into the minor ones (they're minor), but the major one is battery life. It's a thin phone. Battery technology is what it is, and there's only so much you can do in the space they have. The phone looks like it has a pretty vivid, large screen. Huge power drain. Since it's a touch screen, the screen is in use much more than an average phone, meaning even more power used. He gave me the stat that for the Motorala Q they figure one hour of standby time lost for every minute the screen is on. They decided against a similar touch screen for that very reason. Wifi is also a huge drain. Bottom line - phone is very cool looking and has some neat functions, but until battery technology (or physics) changes, it will have some real limitations.
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