Gadzooki

Verizon First To Offer Q from Motorola

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Despite previous denials from Verizon employees, Verizon and Motorola have announced the official release of the Moto Q smartphone. The Motorola Q will retail at $199 so long as you sign up for a 2 year plan with Verizon Wireless. Otherwise, the Q will be substantially more expensive.

Motorola Q

The mQ will feature 64 MB of built in memory and a Mini-SD slot. The screen will be LCD with 320×240 resolution and 65 thousand colors. The moto Q will serve as a media player capable of playing back a variety of audio and video formats. Sound will come to you through dual stereo speakers.

So what exactly is the mQ? Well, it’s the sort of device that lets you do a little bit of everything. Text messaging, emailing, cell phone conversations, web browsing, etc. It is the picture of convergence…and it is here.

And, boy do I want one;-)

Verizon EV-DO In the Woods

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Scott Fullton at Tom’s Networking has a fascinating report on his experience with Verizon’s EV-DO wireless internet service…out in the woods. The exciting thing about EV-DO is the potential for coast-to-coast blanketed wireless internet access. Right now, though, EV-DO is primarily known for covering large metropolitan areas. So Scott Fullton decided to put the promise of rural EV-DO to the test.

To be sure, the test was conducted only about an hour away from Cincinnati, so it wasn’t like West Virginia or anything. But still, Scott was able to reach a high download rate of 256 kbps. Not blazingly fast, but not bad either, all things considered. However, the speed was strongly related to the time of day, and sometimes dropped below dial up rates.

The biggest problem that Scott encountered were the upload speeds, averaging about 3 kbps. That speed wouldn’t work for us at Gadzooki where we need to upload large picture files of all those toys that the cool kids want.