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…

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.

I just successfully updated my Motorola Q smartphone (Verizon) once again. Hopefully, this update will prove to address the main issues I still have with the phone that I really, really want to love and almost do except for a couple of things: battery life (which supposedly this update greatly improves), sudden/random power downs, flaky behavior with Acura’s HandsFreeLink.

The update’s being referred to as “MOL2″ and you can read about some of the improvements/fixes that make up the updated software on qusers.com. The actual update can be downloaded from Motorola here. It’s by no means a very smooth upgrade process. I got a couple of failed installs along the way and at one point was forced to remove the battery from the phone to get it out of it’s firmware update mode. Luckily, it hadn’t turned into a paper weight yet so I tried again and it started up again but got through the entire install that time. Note, I have seen Motorola phones end up completely useless from failed updates in the past requiring us to have to send them to Motorola to get them to a working state so upgrade at your own risk and try to follow the instructions here as much as possible. I found these after updating myself and it had described the problems I ran into so it’s a good idea to follow these instructions.

Lastly, to get my phone working again after the update had installed successfully I needed to get it reprogrammed. To do so, I dialed *228 and selected option 1. I needed to do this a few times as it failed a couple of times and asked me to call customer support to get it programmed. I didn’t call but kept trying a few more times and it eventually worked just fine. Finally, I also dialed *22899 which supposedly required if you have a data plan as well. Once I did those, my phone was back up and running nicely. 

Tomorrow, I’ll reconnect it the the TL and see if it’s improved at all on the Bluetooth HandsFreeLink front. I’ll also see if the battery life has in fact improved a bit. Hoping for the best…