Wired Wife

Because of her need to access the Internet to calculate distances and get directions, check medical information online, send and receive email, etc., as well as her love of texting that prefers a QWERTY keyboard, my wife got an AT&T Motorola Q Global (aka Q9h) smartphone.

We looked at two alternatives: the higher-priced AT&T Tilt, and the lower-priced Samsung Blackjack II. The Blackjack looked good, and insurance is available for it, but it has a crippled version of Windows Office - i.e., you can read, but not create, Word, Powerpoint and Excel documents - and the keyboard is not as good as the Motorola's. The Tilt has a touchscreen, which initially seemed nice, but the tilting keyboard seems a bit fragile (i.e., the hinges could break, as one reviewer had happen to him), and there is no way to use the keyboard one-handed (but one can't easily hold the Motorola one-handed, either), and it can be cumbersome switching between the keyboard mode and closed mode. The Tilt only comes with Internet Explorer, whereas the Motorola has both IE and Opera for Internet browsers (though one could, of course, install Opera on the Tilt).

The mobile Internet works fairly nicely and quickly, too, though some Websites (maybe all of them?) truncate their features for mobile devices: e.g., in giving driving directions, mobile Mapquest will show maps and turns and turn-by-turn distances, but no Total distance, whereas Google maps will show Total distances as well (and - mobile Live Search seems to miscalculate Total distances, though the desktop version seems to give correct Total distances).

Needless to say, my wife loves it! (And I'm a bit jealous.)