I just traded my old Acura MDX for a new 2011 model. One of the features I was most excited about was the fact that it had a hard drive that I could “record” my music to instead of having my favorite music spread across a bunch of MP3 CDs. My wife’s car, a Cadillac SRX, had similar features and I was assuming (what’s that old saying again?) that my brand new shiny car would do at least as well as hers. Unfortunately, not so much. Continue reading →

A few days ago I replaced my old original Motorola Q with a new Motorola Q9h. Highly recommended for any out there wondering if the things that annoyed you about the original Q had been fixed with Windows Mobile 6 and the new hardware. I certainly was wondering and I couldn’t be happier with it at this point.

Some of the things off the top of my head that I’m so happy to see improve:

• WM6 seems to have gotten rid of the far from useful “Charge Complete” screen you’d get whenever the phone reached full charge.
• At work, group policy requires a pin. It always requires the pin now which is actually much nicer and easier to get into a routine with. With the old Q and WM5, if I had recently locked the phone, I had to hit the asterisk key to unlock it or enter the pin if it had been a while. I don’t know how many times I entered my pin instead of the asterisk and set off on several more buttons to press to recover.
• My favorite change by far is that the new one seems to work perfectly so far with HandsFreeLink (Acura/Honda’s bluetooth hands free system). It shows battery remaining and signal strength on the dashboard, accepts calls just fine, and the best part is that I no longer have say “transfer” when making a call. In the past, nine out of ten times I dialed through Bluetooth, the call would get started but would drop back to my phone immediately. Then I’d hit the HFL button on the steering wheel again, say transfer, and the call would be back on Bluetooth. The new phone doesn’t drop off at all.
• Mobile Outlook now made “delete” a one soft button click function instead of having to go through the menus to do it. Much, nicer now especially when you’re trying to clear out a bunch of text messages at once.
• Battery life on the new phone seems infinite compared to the old Q. I used to run out of battery by the time I got home at least once or twice a week. Every day was a close call. We tested the new one and it went three days without a charge before we got critical low battery warning.
• Lastly, a few more minor nice touches like autocomplete on mail recipients and some improvements on calendar views really help.

I haven’t really found anything I’m not all that happy with yet (surely that might change over time). I was worried at first that Opera was the only browser on the phone but then found IE buried deep in the menus–I still prefer IE so that was good news. I was pretty sure I had heard that Hotmail was also available via Push but I haven’t found a way to make that happen. Other than that though, I’m very pleased this time…

My wife and I each drive Acuras that have what I guess is officially called the “XMNavTraffic” feature. Basically, it shows traffic information in the navigation system which turns out to be remarkably useful sometimes. Unfortunately, for weeks now, neither car has been showing any traffic info (i.e., when you set it to show traffic we’re not seeing any of the green/red coloring you’d normally see).

The XM traffic channel for Seattle seems to be up just fine. When I click on the “Traffic Incidents” option it says there’s no traffic information within 30 miles of my current location. We called our Acura dealer to see if they knew anything and they pointed us to XM radio. We called XM and they said they’d look into it and get back to us within 24 hours. It’s been over two weeks now.

Anyone else seeing the same?

Update (11/16/07):

This is pretty funny (i.e., sad) but it turns out that it wasn’t that the service was down or any other kind of issue. It’s that we weren’t paying for it. :) Turns out that we were on a trial when we first bought the cars but they ran out. We were thinking it was included in the price for the XM radio service but it turns out to not be–it’s a separate $4 a month per car. A bit pricey methinks but we do have it again and it all works again.

So far the update has been good for my phone. Several nice but subtle improvements I’ve noticed and appreciated. An example is how it automatically goes into the ALT text input state when asking for your pin/password when locked. It took a little while to get used to but it’s much nicer now.

The battery life does actually seem to have improved a bit as I haven’t yet been close to running out after a full day’s use with the “As They Arrive” email synchronization setting. That mode is amazing actually and I’d really recommend you try it. It’s quite often the case now that I notice my phone notify me of new email before Outlook on my computer does.

I haven’t had a chance yet to use it much in the TL (via HandsFreeLink) though but the few calls I’ve made/received have gone without a problem. Haven’t noticed the disconnected sound when making calls or anything yet so I’m still hopeful that’s been addressed in the update. However, pairing it to the car was still as much of a pain as it has always been. It took me like ten tries before it finally accepted it instead of just dropping out on the last step of the process.

A while back I posted about my experience so far using my Motorola Q with my Acura TL’s Handsfree Link bluetooth system. There were some quirks overall but it seemed to work–at least the mainline scenarios did. Some folks also posted several comments with other issues they were experiencing at the time.

A few days ago I posted about the update I found and installed for the Q on Motorola’s site. I’m now happy to say it seems to have fixed all of the issues I’d run into so far and actually added features. In addition to the battery life I also now have the signal indicator coming through (see image above and compare it to the image in my first post). I was also unable to reproduce the problem where whenever you’d answer an incoming call it would play the dropped call sound, unmute the stereo for an instant and then mute it and put you back on the call. Now it seems to just answer it the way it was meant to in a nice smooth way. I tried it five times in a row and didn’t have any problems and it used to happen pretty much every time before so I’m thinking it’s really fixed.

I got a new phone–again. I think I have a problem with acquiring new phones but that’s a subject for a different day. Anyway, the new one is a Motorola Q (more info) which so far is pretty much the perfect phone in my opinion (if you’re okay with not having wifi access). It’s a smartphone with a little qwerty keyboard. It’s really actually super thin and light, has a really bright display, and just plain old great so far on the usability side.

For those who are wondering if the Motorola Q will pair successfully with an Acura TL (via the HandsFreeLink feature), the answer is yes. It took me a few tries to get it work (for some reason our TL, or all TLs, have a tendency to fail to pair right at the last step in the process) but it worked and I’ve successfully made, received calls, caller id works, and even the battery indicator is coming through on the dashboard. This is the first of maybe 3-4 bluetooth phones I’ve used with the car that had support for the battery display on the dashboard.

I think I’m going to keep this phone for quite some time. It’s the first time I get a phone/pda that I’m not left wanting something different on it or annoyed by some random issues. Given my past experience, I think it’s going to take quite a bit to get me to move on from this one.