I’ve always been a fan of Black-combined with the style of their “always-on ‘keyboards. Being able to exploit e-mails fast without having to drag on a physical keyboard clumsy, or withdraw a fiddly stylus and tap the text, a painful letter at a time, on a small touch screen, keyboard is a huge bonus.

The problem is very few manufacturers - especially those who produce variations Windows Mobile - have been able to remove this type of device with a certain degree of success. The key to these devices tend to be small and fiddly, as Samsung i600 device or devices themselves simply too big and heavy as a result of hosting the entire width QWERTY layout. Numbers are not easy, either using digital generally integrated into the alphabetical arrangement and difficult to do.

The superbly thin and lightweight i-Mate 201 Jama made a good stab at the presentation During the examination at the end of the year, along with the recent Samsung i780, but everyone has the defects of use. The Motorola Q 9 am, on the other hand, has none, effortlessly sweeping all the concerns expressed above. In fact this is the first Windows Mobile smartphone to take on BlackBerry devices best at their own game and beat them in areas where it matters most.

The main reason is the Q 9h superb keyboard. The Blackberry 8800 series of phones had a monopoly on good QWERTY keyboard design to this point, but Motorola is even better. The rounded, rubbery keys are simply superb: they provide a positive assessment, are only curves enough to offer a decent amount of key-key separation to not constantly in liquidation hitting the wrong key when you type keyboard, and letters and key size is such that you do not have to squint to see if you’re pressing the right or not.

It is so good that I wrote the first 200 words of this very critical of it while he was sitting on the sofa watching television without the curse of swearing or once - and it only took a few minutes of my time. In fact, near the slide-out keyboard on the Samsung F700, I would say that this is the best hardware keyboard that I used on any phone.

Unfortunately, a phone with a superb these QWERTY thumb-board is never to be as compact as, for example, the Asus P320 PDA phone I reviewed recently - you simply can not make a usable keyboard much smaller than this — , But Motorola has done its best with the design to ensure that no more large or ugly that must be.

It is thinner than the BlackBerry 8820, for example, 11.8mm for the Blackberry of 14.5 mm, and 134g, it is by weight. It looks much too nice, I think, with his side lozenge on profile costs in light blue stripe around the button at the top of group keyboard. The principal means of five keys navigation is not as black as the Blackberry pearl scroll, but at least it does not address issues of ease of use the Samsung i780 innovative but problematic trackpad.

Instead of disabled bizarre version of Office Mobile, you usually get with Windows Mobile Standard devices - where you can edit documents, but not create new ones - Q 9h includes a copy to see DataViz Documents To Go In addition to creating documents, it is actually a much more powerful mobile office suite Office Mobile, and it is a big improvement over the single view software you get with Blackberry phones. The only drawback is that it does not support files. Docx documents and other formats of Office 2008.

There is also the complete version of Opera Mobile included - in fact, I prefer the free Opera Mini 4.1, but it is still better than ineffective mobile browser Microsoft and offers complete end-to-end encryption for online shopping, banking and others. And there are a multitude of other utilities to add to Windows Mobile habit too, including a complete package of tools Bluetooth, a VPN and application of voice recognition / component software.

In terms of mobile data, the Q phone is 9am slouch. It’s going faster than HSDPA BlackBerry devices with speeds of 3.6Mbit/sec supported, alongside GPRS and EDGE and quad-band phone capability, plus it has Bluetooth 2.0. But only £ 245 unlocked, something that is going to have to give, and in the case of Q 9h is the rest of the specifications.

There is no Wi-Fi capability, for example, and no GPS. Unfortunately, the phone has only 2 megapixel camera and, despite its rapid HSDPA data, no accompanying video call VGA camera. The small screen is a 2.4in 320 x 240, despite the great chassis, and the processor and memory complement - a chip ARM 200MHz and 64MB RAM - do not seem particularly generous.

This is not all bad news, however, and the Q 9 am fighting back with an ingenious sensor on the front that dims the screen at an appropriate level depending on the ambient light. And, despite the humble building blocks, Windows Mobile does not seem to suffer at all - it is a very nippy, responsive phone use.