Motorola Q9h (AT&T)

Pros: GPS(!) and WM6

Cons: Battery life, size and no GPS cradle

Summary: As a major BlackJack fan and road warrior, I scooped up the Motorola Q9h because I wanted a similar product with Windows Mobile 6 and -- more importantly -- GPS.

As a road warrior, I spend an extra $10/day on GPS for the car, so I really wanted something that could save my company money. The integrated GPS and TeleNav software is very solid and speaks the words through the speaker or even your bluetooth device.

If you want a QWERTY keyboard phone, clean interface and integrated GPS, this is a great phone (note: I am waiting to see the BlackJack II that has the same features).

So here are my gripes first:

1) Just like the BlackJack, these companies sell you on the wow factor of a "thin" device. In reality they sell you a cheap power-less battery and you need to use the bigger battery that adds a larger case on the back.

2) Although some people complained about the BlackJack's keys being too close together, I never had a problem with this and was disheartened by the larger size of the Motorola which seems to be as a result of larger keys. This is bad for me and maybe better for you.

3) If you want to use TeleNav (and trust me road warriors, it is worth it) the software has a fee of about $10/month. Although worth it, I was really frustrated that yet another fee was added to the phone and that was not really clear to me (it was probably in that all-too-familiar fine print).

4) If you are using the AT&T unit (I don't know about other carriers), you will find the Opera browser front-and-center and Internet Explorer buried under a folder. This is not good because the Opera browser on WM6 is horrible. I just visited a bare-bones website that had a drop-down menu and the page would refresh to show details of what you selected. I got error messages from the site. The IE browser is superior in my opinion.

And here are my good comments:

1) Despite what others say about how the phone looks, I do get eyes from people about how nice it looks.

2) I don't know where this improvement lays but text messaging is really fast as compared to the 2125 or BlackJack.

3) Windows Mobile 6 greatly improves sync with Exchange and when used with Exchange 2007, the feature list is quite significant. If your company uses Exchange/Outlook, this is really the best product.

Overall, I am happy with the phone. Note to Motorola and Samsung: just develop the darn thing with the battery size in mind so I don't feel misled by the phone's size.