As this posting’s title suggests, is the iPhone “equal to or greater than” the Motorola Q?!?  With the recent realization by Apple that the iPhone should be more corporate-friendly, aren’t they just creating a wannabe MotoQ?

Motorola’s Q family of phones already has so many of the iPhone features and has a long standing history of working with corporate email.  Plus, the Q does MMS (unlike the iPhone) and has long been on EVDO, while the iPhone is just now getting 3G instead of the pathetically slow EDGE network. As I’ve shown before, the Q has iPod functionality of the iPhone, albeit with Windows Media Player instead of iTunes.  Even their lower price seems to want to take on the Q’s pricing.

As noted before, I’ve moved on from my Motorola Q.  I’d love to donate it to a worthy cause, or even turn it in at the upcoming TechBirmingham Ecycling Day.  BUT, I want to see it depart clean as a whistle.  So, here’s what I did…

FIRST, get rid of all email accounts.  Enter the email function, select any account and choose the soft menu “Menu”, “Options” submenu choice.  Next, select “Account Options” and highlight (do NOT select) the account which you wish to delete.  Select the soft menu “Menu” at this point and choose the “Delete” submenu choice.  You will be warned with the following message:

All messages that are linked to “xxxxxx” will be cleared.  All messages in the Outbox will be cleared too. Continue?

Of course, you want to select the “Yes” soft menu.  Depending on how many emails are in the account, give it a minute or two.  Repeat for each account.

SECOND… If you look in the Options section, you’ll notice that this does NOT work, however for Text or MMS Messages… so another tactic is required. 

They were the best of times… and the worst of times, sometimes.  After a 21 month love affair with my Motorola Q, I’ve decided to move on.  It’s fitting that today is Valentine’s Day, but this time it’s a break-up.  <sigh!>

No, I’m not graduating to one of the new Motorola Q9, nor one of its cousins.  I’m moving back to a flip phone replete with everything that I had on the Q.  I’m trading in the keyboard for battery life.  I just could not handle having the *extended life* battery not charge overnight or die a quick death after only the morning use.  I may even start to further pursue my nascent desire to escape from email hell by not adding my half-dozen accounts to the new phone.  Fresh starts and all that.

I am, however, going to let this blog enjoy its halflife as so many of you (regularly 50+ new visitors each day) show up for help with the infamous 85010014 bug and gain some solace in the explanation I offered so long ago.

UPDATE: battery life may be a Mobile Windows issue as the new phone isn’t holding a charge either!

With the Motorola Q’s battery sucking nature, it’s interesting that the good folks over at textually.org are reporting that researchers at UC Berkeley have developed technology that could eventually be weaved into clothing to power cell phones:

“… the temperatures generated by body heat could produce enough electricity to charge the batteries in small technology. Ideally, this finding could lead to special clothing and other wearable materials that produce electrical current for batteries in cell phones and handheld computers, or power the devices themselves.”

TG Daily goes further, by stating:

“… personal power-jackets that could use heat from the human body to recharge cell-phones and other electronic devices.”

Just think… a way to use our Motorola Q’s out in the world without suffering from battery problems.  <sigh!>  We can hope for that day.

So, you may have set your MotoQ to silent or meeting mode, expecting the phone to stay quiet.  But, there are conditions where despite your wishes the venerable Motorola Q makes annoying noise.  The most annoying is when you’ve got the phone set to notify you when you’ve lost connection to the network… and you enter a large meeting in a conference center and all of a sudden it starts making an audible noise to notify you.  If this only happened once, then that’d be fine.  The worst is when the signal kinda comes and goes… and the MotoQ “announces” that it has reconnected and disconnected, perhaps constantly.  Ugh!