Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE review

Motorola's phone designs are nothing if not consistent. Since the original Droid, nearly every device the company has made with a physical keyboard has looked and felt the same: a chunky rectangle with slightly rounded corners. That about describes the Photon: it's a black rectangle, though its corners are more sharply angled than most. The front panel of the phone is glossy and reflective, while the slider piece underneath is a textured matte black; I'd rather the whole handset take on the matte material, but I like the dual look too.

It's a big phone, make no mistake — at 2.5 inches wide, 4.9 inches tall, and more than a half-inch thick, it feels giant in my hand. Of course, such are the necessary tradeoffs with a keyboarded phone, but it means you should make absolutely sure you're going to use the keyboard a lot before you buy the Photon Q.

The device's other trappings are fairly standard. The power button is on top of the phone, as is the headphone jack; there are Micro USB and Micro HDMI jacks on the left side, and volume buttons, a dedicated camera shutter press, and a microSD slot on the right side. I appreciate everything being easy to access, even if it does make the phone look kind of cluttered — nothing's hidden underneath the back cover, or requires you to take out the battery. The phone's front face has a silver speaker grille, with a glowing green notification LED embedded in the middle. (I turned off the LED to avoid triggering my BlackBerry-induced Pavlovian response to the glowing light, but for most people it's a nice feature.) There's a Motorola logo underneath, but with no capacitive Android buttons the phone's face still looks very minimalist. The rugged, grippy back looks like it belongs in a tool belt: there's a wide speaker grille on the bottom, an unsightly plaque with the 8-megapixel camera and LED flash, and a Motorola logo in the middle.

The fact that Motorola is still producing phones with 960 x 540 displays is fine – sure, it's the same resolution as the Droid X2 I bought more than a year ago, but it's fine. The problem is that Motorola's trying to pass the Photon Q off as a high-end phone, while simultaneously calling the Atrix HD and its 720p display "mid-range." It just doesn't add up.

That aside, the Photon Q's display isn't bad, and it's much better than the Droid 4. The LCD display is a little bit over-contrasted, partly thanks to Motorola's ColorBoost technology — it does make colors pop, and looks much better than the washed-out LCD on the Droid 4, but it's a little much for my taste. Blacks are deep and whites are true, though; that helps a lot. Text is slightly jaggy and edges are slightly soft, but only if you REALLY look for it. This is a perfectly good screen, but I've seen better.

The camera on the back of the Photon Q is fast. Really fast. Its autofocus is working constantly, so by the time you've framed your shot it's probably already in focus. There's virtually no shutter lag or processing time required — it's so fast that if I couldn't hear the shutter sound, it was sometimes tough to tell if I'd taken a picture at all.

Pictures look... fine. They're accurate enough and decently sharp from the 8-megapixel rear sensor, as long as you're in good light; in anything else, forget about it. By default, the Photon Q shoots 6-megapixel images in a widescreen aspect ratio so they look better on the phone itself — if you ever want to view your photos anywhere else, you're going to want to jump into settings and turn that off. 720p video also looks decent, without being overly impressive. The front-facing camera is, well, a front-facing camera: it's terrible for anything but video chats, and the lens is located slightly off-center, so it's a bit hard to frame your face.

The Photon Q runs a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, which is at the absolute high end of mobile chipsets right now. The Photon Q is smooth and fast in its operation, and I had virtually no issues with using it. There are still some stutters in the OS, though, like the aforementioned screen-rotating issues, many of which are fixed in Android 4.1. Sadly, I'm left thinking the same thing Dieter wondered about the Atrix HD: just how good could the Photon Q be with Jelly Bean's buttery improvements?

Still, I had no major issues with the Photon Q, from gaming to multitasking to general stability. The phone does tend to get hot – you'll notice it in your pocket or your hand — but it's not enough to be a huge problem. Call quality is great, as I've come to expect from Motorola: I could hear and be heard clearly, and though the earpiece is slightly on the quiet side it's still really good. Speakerphone, on the other hand, is a disaster: if I was more than about six inches away from the phone I was totally inaudible.

Reception is solid, about what I expect from Sprint. Sadly, data speeds are also what I expect. Sprint's LTE network is rolling out slowly but surely across the US, but unless you're in one of a select number of markets you're out of luck for now. I'm not in one of those markets, and Sprint's 3G performance in New York City is pretty rough: I saw speeds hovering about 250Kbps down, though at slightly over 1Mbps upload speeds were at least a bit faster. AnandTech and others have found Sprint's LTE to be fast (if still inconsistent, even where it's available), but most customers are going to have to wait a while for it.

Basically, all I expect from my smartphone is that it get me through a full day. The Photon Q certainly does, but only a full day — if I didn't charge the device every night it was dead in the morning. My results came without LTE coverage, too; the situation may well be worse on the faster network.