Motorola Q

How many people have cellphones that can take pictures, video, browse the internet, bluetooth, infrared, beam contacts and do a thousand other features they will never use?

I've had a pda phone for over a year now and only in the last month have I begun the realize how much easier this little sucker can make my life. It had so many features that it overwhelmed my to inaction.... so I did nothing with the mini-computer except make calls. Well, occasionally I would snap a picture message and I love to text message.

A recent problem I had was the growing discrepancy between my calendar reminders in my phone and on my computer. I'm slowly stepping away from the paper lists and piles of sticky notes (I said slowly!) and beginning to rely more on my devices for scheduling my days. The problem was that I could be on the road and set a reminder or appointment into my phone or I'd be at my computer and copy/paste an event into my outlook and neither device was synced with the other.

I set out on the daunting task to install the Motorola Q software on my laptop and it was surprisingly easy. Then I thought that this software must be cumbersome and annoying to navigate... or at least hog my memory (RAM). And again I was surprised; the software was super easy to use, doesn't require a lot of resources and automatically detects when I plug my device into the computer.

A simple connection via usb, the phone syncs my contacts and calendar in about 30 seconds, does a cute little beep and I'm done. Voila! It's that simple to synchronize my life... I mean, my devices.

I had been holding out for an over the air syncing solution but for now, the manual syncing for contacts and calendar is OK. I won't even begin to mess with email until I can get over the air syncing. The possibilities for uber-cool scheduling over the air is nice for when I have a secretary but for now, I'm glad I finally decided to install the software. It only took a year... who knows what I might discover about this device in the next year before my contract is up!

Lesson: maybe you should make it a goal this week to try one new feature on your over-featured phone! Feel free to post your results as a comment to this blog.