HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One review: Home printer has print quality and cheaper inks in its favor

The $130 HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One color inkjet multifunction (copy/print/scan), will cover a low volume of home use nicely. It's exceptionally easy to use, surprisingly capable, and produces impressive output. On the downside are its lack of speed and pricey inks, but HP’s new Instant Ink program might help that somewhat.

The HP Envy 5530 is rather compact for a multifunction printer. The scanner lid is so thin that at first glance, you might not recognize it as such. However, there’s an A4/letter-sized scanner on-board, and it produces good-looking copies and scans. You can even push-scan to a PC across the network—not a feature you see in every printer at this price point.

The Envy 5530 offers automatic duplexing, which isn’t a guarantee in this price range. Everything else about the paper handling is pretty modest: just 100 sheets (input) and 30 sheets (output)—if having printed pages fall right on top of blank pages counts as an output area. If you print any more than 200 pages per month, you should be looking at a more robust machine.

Setting up the HP Envy 5530 is easy whether you use USB or Wi-Fi, and thanks to a 2.65-inch touchscreen and exceptionally well thought out menus, so is operation. The display and all the controls are on the top left of the unit, and intuitively arranged. The only other feature worth mentioning is the SD card slot for direct printing and off-loading scans.

HP doesn't bundle a lot of software with the Envy 5530, but what's there is easy and capable. The driver and scanning utilities are nicely rendered and offer all the features most users need. There's also the now usual suite of remote printing options, including HP ePrint via email and Apple AirPrint.

While the assumption is that this printer isn’t going to be used much, it still bears mentioning that the Envy 5530 is pretty slow. It managed an anemic 5.9 pages per minute (ppm) printing plain text and a few simple, monochrome graphics on both the PC and Mac platforms. Snapshot-sized, 4-by-6-inch photos printed at about 2.5 ppm to plain paper, but to glossy paper that slowed to 0.8 ppm. Full-sized photos printed at about 0.4 ppm on glossy paper, while copies exited at about 3 ppm. Scan times are bearable, albeit two to three times longer than what you'll see from top-shelf units.

Along with minimal paper capacity and slow performance, the Envy 5530 suffers (as most low-cost printers do) from expensive ink. At least if you buy on your own: The standard 61 series black and tri-color cartridges cost $15 and $21 respectively, yet last for only 199 and 165 pages. That's 7.5 cents per page for the black and 12.75 cent per page for the colors, or a daunting 20.15 cents per four-color page. You can reduce those costs considerably with the $30 black and $32 tri-color 61XL cartridges, to about 16 cents per four-color page, but black still comprises a high 6.25 cents of that amount.

As to that "buy on your own" comment, the Envy 5530 is eligible for HP's new Instant Ink service. With Instant Ink, HP sells you massively capacious ink cartridges, then doles the ink out on a monthly basis. You can print 50 pages of anything—a bit of text, or a heavy-coverage photo for a flat fee of $3 a month (6 cents per page), while 100 pages costs $5 a month (5 cents per page), and 300 pages are $10 (3.3 cents per page). That's a whole lot cheaper than manual user replacement, but only if you print fairly close to the number of pages in the plan. If you barely print 100 pages a year, then just buying the cartridges on your own might be a better deal. Also, the whole Instant Ink deal depends on your printer having an Internet connection, and your being comfortable with HP’s managing your printer in the background.

Along with ease of use, the Envy 5530's other major strength is its output quality. Text is clear and sharp, even in draft mode, and color graphics are also surprisingly accurate. You might want to tweak the photo settings a bit for a warmer color temperature on glossy photos, but other than that it's all good.

The HP Envy 5530 is in many ways a typical home printer: It’s somewhat slow, with adequate features, and its low purchase price is balanced out by higher-priced inks. However, its Instant Ink program is intriguing for its savings potential, and its output quality and ease of use are distinctly better than usual for this price class. It’s well worth considering for a home user.

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Brother MFC-J6920dw review: a fast, capable MFP stuck with mediocre print quality

Brother MFC-J6920DW $300.00 With a massive A3-size scanner platen, excellent performance, decent output, and 500-sheet paper capacity, this inkjet MFP will make short work of office chores and do it on the cheap. But there are flaws.

The Brother MFC-J6920DW’s most unique feature is its sideways paper path—paper is inserted long-side first, rather than short-side first. This allows outstanding performance out of a relatively inexpensive ($300) color inkjet MFP (copy/fax/print/scan). However, this is the second sideways printer from Brother we've seen (the MFC-J4510DW being the other) that suffers banding issues, especially in draft mode. Also, Brother has yet to shake the stereotypical inkjet's faded look in color graphics printed to plain paper. This printer’s strongest points are speed and super-cheap inks, plus, it has great scanning capabilities. It’s worth considering for a medium-volume small office with modest graphics needs.

While my editor thinks the Brother MFC-J6920DW looks like an squared-off mushroom, I like the way it's larger on top than on the bottom. (Star Wars meets Gumby?) Of course, the reason for its bulk—a large, ledger/A3-sized scanner platen, which allows no-stitch scanning of larger documents, has a lot to do with my liking. There's also a 35-sheet automatic document feeder, and the MFC-J6920DWsports dual scanning elements so it can copy a two-sided document in a single pass. If you regularly scan both sides of the paper, that's the next best thing to a sheet-fed scanner.

Nearly everything is done via the 3.7-inch color touchscreen display with its intuitive menu structure. The ink cartridges are found under a flip-open panel to the right of the output tray. A similar door on the left houses the Memory Stick, Secure Digital, and PictBridge ports for direct printing and storing of scans. The MFC-J6920DW may be connected via Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or USB. Setup is easy, and the scanning software and drivers are top-notch.

Paper capacity is one of the MFC-J6920DW's strengths, with two 250-sheet paper cassettes on board. That's a good chunk of the unit's 1500-page recommended monthly volume (the official monthly duty cycle is 26,000 pages). Two-sided (duplex) printing is automatic, and in my hands-on, it didn't bog down printing as much as it does on other units.

One flaw I noted was that the MFC-J6920DW had difficulty picking up the last sheet of paper in the cassette. This even occurred when I was using photo paper. It's not the worst thing in the world having to put two sheets in the cassette instead of one, but it isn't confidence-inspiring. Also, after a last sheet mis-feed, the job wasn't automatically restarted, and the first subsequent page was a partial print.

Speed is excellent nearly throughout. Text and monochrome graphics print at 13.7 pages per minute on the Mac, and 12.8 pages per minute on the PC. Snapshots (4-inch by 6-inch) print at just over 4 ppm on plain paper and 1 minute, 1 second to print on glossy paper. A full-page photo printed on the Mac took a whopping 4 minutes, 14 seconds on the Mac, though in my hands-on with the PC, it was more around two minutes. Copies also arrived quickly at around 5 pages per minute.

Scans were decently quick at about 6 seconds for previewing, 30 seconds for 600 dpi, and about a minute at 1200 dpi.

The quality of the MFC-J6920DW's output is the usual Brother yin and yang. Text isn't the sharpest or blackest we've seen, but it's adequate even for correspondence. Photos printed on glossy stock are also good, though the colors are a bit over-saturated. Plain-paper graphics is where the quality dips. While okay for charts or spot color, there's a definite faded look to photos.

An unfortunate print-quality effect is banding between passes of the printhead. When printing in draft mode, there was a noticeable difference in the brightness between the right and left sides of the page. There was no evidence of banding at the default or best settings, but in our color copy, which has a lot of solid color, we noticed fine white lines running vertically down the page at consistent intervals.

Scan quality was decent, but color images showed harsh, dark shadows, and line art tended to be a little fuzzy or jaggy.

The Brother MFC-J6920DW's ink comes in XL and XXL sizes, which are referred to by Brother as high-yield and super high-yield. While this begs the question of what happened to regular-yield, the ink is cheap regardless. You have to search around for the 2400-page LC109BK XXL black cartridge: We found it for online $38, off from $40 retail, which makes for a very attractive 1.5 cents per page.

Per the numbers at Brother's site, the LC103 XL cartridges all last for 600 pages with the black costing $25, or 4.165 cents per page. The colors cost $15 apiece, or 2.5 cents per page so you wind up with an approximately 11.5 cent four-color page. The more capacious, 1200-page LC105 colors cost $23 each, which drops per-page color costs to about 5.75 cents. With the LC109BK, that would make for super-cheap, four-color page of about 7.25 cents.

The MFC-J6920DW is a bit rough around the edges, but it could serve many mainstream offices competently. It's especially suitable if you regularly scan large and two-sided documents.

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Review: Dell Latitude 6430u offers high quality throughout

Whatever happens to Dell in the near future, let’s hope that the company keeps making notebooks as nice as the Latitude 6430u. In a world of cheap-feeling merchandise, it stands apart. It’s sedately handsome, ruggedized, remarkably stable in your hand and on the table, and a tactile joy to use. It’s also fast and available with a wide variety of warranty and support options, as a good corporate computer should be.

Why on earth would anyone start a review by talking about a laptop’s physical stability and feel? Partly because it’s better than talking about the 6430u’s 4-pound bulk, but also because there’s palpable pleasure in handling a well-balanced unit sporting a silky, soft-to-the-touch feel. The unusually uniform weight distribution comes courtesy of the flat battery pack that occupies the lower front quarter of the unit. That balance makes the unit feel lighter than it actually is.

The 6430u’s heft also makes it a very stable typing platform, which accentuates the already nice feel of the Chiclet-style keyboard. The keyboard response is a little lighter than a Lenovo’s, but combined with the solidity of the 6430u, the overall experience might actually be a wee bit better—high praise in my book. The keyboard is backlit, and you can control the lighting intensity via a function-key combination. The unit’s touchpad has silky-smooth response, and buttons on the top and bottom reduce hand travel when clicks are required. Even the eraserhead pointing device is well adjusted. Someone at Dell obviously spent considerable time designing the ergonomics.

Our test configuration of the 6430u sported an Intel Core i5-3427u processor, 8GB of DDR3 memory, and a 128GB Samsung PM830 solid-state drive, which helped the unit earn a very capable score of 78 on PCWorld’s WorldBench 8 test suite. The integrated Intel HD 4000 GPU’s game play is mediocre but doable at 800 by 600 or so. There’s no discrete-GPU option, but this is a business machine first and foremost.

The 6430u’s startup time is a mere 10 seconds, and battery life is a very nice 6 hours, 18 minutes. That’s enough to get you coast to coast, at least with the jet stream at your back. Our test unit shipped with Windows 8. Given that the Latitude is sold primarily as a business-fleet model, a Start Menu replacement, such as IObit’s free Start Menu 8 or Stardock’s $5 Start8, might be welcome. All the flavors of the more business-friendly Windows 7 are available as well.

One might quibble with a pricey laptop whose 14-inch display tops out at a 1366-by-768-pixel resolution. (A 1600 by 900 option is available for an additional $52.) But unless you’re adamant about having 1080p video, the display looks great. No touchscreen model is available, but that could be a good thing when you consider the impression that a fingerprint-filled screen would make in the meeting room.

The 6430u’s port array is a nice blend of legacy and modern ports. The unit’s left side sports VGA output, a USB 3.0 port, a Wi-Fi switch, the headset jack, and the power cord jack. The right side is home to a powered USB 3.0 port, the gigabit ethernet port, and a Kensington lock port for securing the unit. Another benefit of positioning the battery at the lower front is that Dell could center ports on the back of the unit, including a combo eSATA/USB 3.0 port and an HDMI output. Our test unit came with both dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. Broadband (including LTE) and WiGig (60GHz) cards are available as well.

The unit we tested costs $1279 (as of March 27, 2013). Besides the already mentioned options, you can provision the 6430u with faster or slower CPUs, more memory, a larger hard drive, a smart-card reader, and the modular external USB drive enclosure that in our model came fitted with a DVD drive. Pricing starts at around $900 for an entry-level model and rises to a little under $2100 for a fully loaded system. A three-year warranty is standard, but you can opt for a 4- or 5-year option, as well as onsite service.

I rarely get this enthusiastic over a corporate product of any sort, but I’m a sucker for products that are tactilely and ergonomically superior. The Latitude 6430u is expensive, but most truly superb things are. Even consumers should seriously consider this ultrabook, since the entry-level configuration is more than adequate for most purposes, and the three-year warranty makes a big-box store’s extended warranty unnecessary.

Editor's note: This review was corrected for a factual error. All the USB ports on the Latitude 6430u are USB 3.0. PCWorld regrets the error.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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Review: Dell C1760nw color printer has great output quality but pricey toner

We’ve spent a lot of electronic ink telling you to avoid low-cost color laser printers, because they’re all slow, with sparse features, and worst of all, really expensive toner. We’d almost advise the same about the $280 (as of March 25, 2013) Dell C1760nw color laser-class printer (it uses LED technology), but it has one thing going for it: impressive graphics quality, which is challenging to find on any office color laser printer at any price point. Choose this one above the rest, if you must, but you might also want to check out the faster, far more economical, office-class inkjets that we’ve seen from Epson and HP.

The C1760nw's two-line LCD display and control buttons are minimal, but effective. The menu structure is nicely laid out, making options easy to find. A blue light directly above the controls indicates the status of Wi-Fi connections. You can also manage the printer via Wi-Fi or Ethernet using the unit's HTML configuration interface. In addition to the PC and Mac drivers, the C1760nw offers remote-printing features, including printing from mobile devices and via email.

As with most low-cost color lasers, paper-handling features on the C1760nw are sparse. The front face folds down to create a 150-sheet, open-faced input tray on the bottom of the unit. A 10-page, removable bypass tray sits directly on top of it. The bypass tray allows you to print envelopes and other one-offs without unloading and reloading that main tray, as required with the single-tray C1660w. The output bin integrated into the top of the unit holds 100 sheets. The C1760nw lacks automatic two-side printing (duplexing), however, onscreen prompts walk you through the manual process. You can easily reach most of the paper path for clearing paper jams by folding down the panel on the back of the unit, and the toner cartridges are accessed via a panel on the right side of the unit.

Though cheaper than the C1660w's, the C1760nw's toner is still no bargain. The 3.5 cents you'll pay per black page is around the average for entry-level inkjets, but the additional 5 cents for each additional color is high. Black toner is sold in $70, 2000-page units and the 1400-page cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges cost $70 each as well. Those are the high-capacity supplies. Dell also sells the 700-page cartridges the C1760nw ships with, but unless you want to pay over 7 cents per page (cpp) for black pages and over 8 cents per color, we recommend against them.

Melissa Riofrio

While adding color to a C1760nw page is expensive, it's definitely worth it. Color graphics and photos look far better than what we’ve normally seen from an inexpensive, laser-class printer. Text is outstandingly sharp, and black areas are smooth and uniform, if a tad lighter than we'd like.

The C1760nw posted average to slow time in our speed tests, using the ethernet connection. Full-page (letter-size) photos print to laser glossy paper at 1.5 pages per minute (ppm). Smaller, snapshot-sized (4- by-6-inch) photos print at 1.8 ppm to plain paper and just under 1.46 ppm to glossy laser stock. Black text and mixed pages of black text and monochrome graphics print at an aggregate 8 on the PC and 8.2 on the Mac.

The C1760w carries a one-year warranty with easy exchange. You can pump that up to five years with exchange for $80, and on-site service is also available. The drum/fuser is a lifetime unit, and those support options are reassuring when no replacement is readily available. Dell quotes a 30,000-page duty cycle, but in real life this is about a 500-page-a-month unit. Even if the unit can handle heavier use, print more than 500 pages and the price of the toner will start catching up to you.

Color laser devotees, we know you’re out there. If you must buy a low-cost color laser, the Dell C1760nw is one we’re willing to recommend--albeit with many reservations--because of its unusually good graphics quality.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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The daughter of a mechanical engineer, Melissa grew up playing with machine parts and still loves getting into the nuts and bolts of how things work. She is never happier than when she is on a factory tour.
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Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE Review: A Nice Keyboard, but Middling Call Quality

As someone who uses his phone more often to send text messages than to make calls, I've been disappointed at the lack of phones with physical keyboards. Software keyboards are getting better every year (my favorite for Android is SwiftKey); but until I can accurately touch-type on them, I'll continue to prefer having physical buttons for typing long messages. Someone at Motorola seems to have read my thoughts, because the company's new Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE for Sprint ($200 with a new two-year contract, price as of August 8, 2012) is one of the best keyboard-equipped smartphones you can buy right now.

Design

The Photon Q looks like a slightly chunkier version of the Motorola Photon 4G, which premiered on Sprint last year. Both phones have angled corners, though the Photon Q lacks the Photon 4G's useful kickstand. The Photon Q's angled corners make it comfortable to hold while making calls, and the phone is compact enough to fit easily into most pockets. The Photon Q is largely composed of a soft plastic that feels good to the touch, though I was hoping that the phone would be wrapped in Kevlar like the Droid Razr and the Droid Razr Maxx.

The front of the phone accommodates a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera and a 4.3-inch 540-by-960-resolution display that uses the same Color Boost technology we saw on the Motorola Atrix HD. Motorola claims that Color Boost gives smartphones 50 percent more pixels than the leading smartphone offers, though the Photon Q's screen wasn't as sharp as the ones on the Samsung Galaxy S III, Atrix HD, or HTC One X. (It did look sharper and more vibrant than the screen on the Motorola Droid Bionic, however.) Like the Galaxy Nexus and the Atrix HD, the Photon Q uses Ice Cream Sandwich's virtual navigation buttons in the place of physical ones.

The back of the Photon Q holds an 8-megapixel camera and the phone's external speaker. The Photon Q uses a 1785mAh embedded battery; embedded batteries are supposed to last longer, but you can't replace the battery yourself if it ever becomes damaged or unable to hold much charge.

Along the left spine are the Photon Q's charging port and MicroHDMI port. The right spine of the phone hosts the volume rocker, a physical camera button, and a small flap covering the MicroSD card slot.

The Keyboard

The last keyboard-equipped phone I reviewed, the Motorola Droid 4, carried an above-average mobile keyboard with top-notch buttons. The Photon Q's keyboard is virtually identical to the Droid 4's. The keys are set slightly too close together for my taste, but the buttons felt great under my fingers as I typed. The only button I had a problem with was the spacebar, which emitted an audible cracking noise every time I pressed it. Though the button worked, but the sound it made was a bit unsettling.

Performance

Powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon S4 processor with 1GB of RAM, the Photon Q handled virtually everything I threw at it without a hitch. Even when scrolling through content-heavy pages, the phone rarely slowed down perceptibly, except when the browser tried to load a high-resolution image or video. Even then, I could keep multiple apps open and running simultaneously in the background without slowing the device to a crawl.

If you're a big mobile gamer, you'll appreciate that the Photon Q can handle most games available in the Play Store. One bonus of having a physical keyboard is that some games and emulators let you map specific actions to specific keys. The arrangement isn't perfect, but it's a huge step up from having to use a virtual control pad.

Call quality over Sprint's network left a lot to be desired: Voices sounded a bit muffled, and I heard a low buzzing noise whenever someone spoke. You and your caller will be able to hear each other, but you may have to speak up a bit to make yourself heard clearly. I tested the phone in our San Francisco office—an area with good reception. Since call quality varies depending on your location, you should consult coverage maps to get an idea of how good the call quality will be in your area.

The Photon Q is one of just a handful of phones that can connect to Sprint's new LTE network. Unfortunately, that network has yet to launch in San Francisco, so I couldn't test the phone's speeds on it. On Sprint's current 3G network over a strong 3G connection, the Photon Q managed an average download speed of 0.49 megabit per second and an average upload speed of 0.86 mbps, according to my measurements using the FCC-approved Ookla Speed Test app.

Even with LTE turned on, the Photon Q held out over the better part of a day (about 5.5 hours) of normal use—including sending text messages, downloading a few apps, and playing a game or two for several minutes at a time—before the battery ran out of juice. We haven't yet run the Photon Q through our official PCWorld Labs suite of battery tests; when we do, we'll update this page.

The Photon Q does have an NFC chip, so you'll be able to take advantage of any software that may use that technology.

Software

Swiping upward on certain app icons will present you with new information.The Photon Q ships with Android 4.0.4 beneath a custom Motorola overlay. I used a Motorola phone back in the days when the company relied on MotoBlur, and this new overlay is leaps and bounds better. For the most part, the operating system looks and behaves like Android Ice Cream Sandwich, with just a few tweaks.

Some app icons have little arrows next to them that you can swipe to pop up a small "quick-look" window. Depending on the app, these windows display different information. For example, swiping the Browser app icon will pop up a grid that displays your bookmarks, but swiping the Email app icon will show your inbox and identify the number of unread emails you have. The fact that Motorola Mobility (the part of the company that makes phones) is now a subsidiary of Google may have led Motorola to exercise some restraint in tricking out its overlay, but in any case I'm glad that the new overlay doesn't change the look and feel of Android too drastically.

The Photon Q comes with two preloaded Sprint apps (Sprint ID and Sprint Zone) that can't be uninstalled, but I applaud the carrier for keeping the quantity of preloaded apps to a minimum.

Entertainment

With only Sprint's snail's-pace 3G network to connect to, and without widespread LTE coverage, you probably won't be streaming many HD movies to your phone unless you live in one of the 15 areas in the United States that currently have Sprint LTE. It'll be a while before the rest of us can connect to that faster network.

If you hate "the cloud" and want to keep all of your media locally on your device, you'll probably want to invest in a MicroSD card. The Photon Q offers 8GB of built-in storage, but that fills up pretty quickly once you start downloading apps and taking pictures.

The rear speaker on the phone delivers decent sound; but for higher-quality audio, I recommend using headphones.

Camera

I wasn't particularly impressed with the photos I got from the Photon Q's 8-megapixel camera. They tended to be a bit dark, and colors looked washed out. The Photon Q's Camera app provides few extras, though the phone does have a zero-shutter-lag camera courtesy of Android 4.0. The front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera works well for video calls and is clear enough that you can use it to take a quick Facebook self-portrait.

The Photon Q can record video in 1080p, though footage looked a tad too dark. Audio pickup was slightly muffled, probably due to the location of the microphone (it's on the bottom half of the phone to the right of the keyboard).

Overall, the Photon Q's camera isn't the best I've seen, but it's adequate. Indoor photos may come out looking rather dark, so try to avoid shooting in poorly lit areas. The phone's video quality is quite good, but don't expect it to pick up every bit of audio from whatever you are recording.

Bottom Line

Though a bit on the chunky side and hampered by a mediocre camera, the Photon Q is a solid choice for anyone who wants a phone with a physical keyboard. If you're a huge texter, or if you compose a lot of email messages on your phone, this model is well worth considering. It's not perfect, but the Photon Q is currently the keyboard phone to beat.

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Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE Review: A Nice Keyboard, but Middling Call Quality

As someone who uses his phone more often to send text messages than to make calls, I've been disappointed at the lack of phones with physical keyboards. Software keyboards are getting better every year (my favorite for Android is SwiftKey); but until I can accurately touch-type on them, I'll continue to prefer having physical buttons for typing long messages. Someone at Motorola seems to have read my thoughts, because the company's new Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE for Sprint ($200 with a new two-year contract, price as of August 8, 2012) is one of the best keyboard-equipped smartphones you can buy right now.

Design

The Photon Q looks like a slightly chunkier version of the Motorola Photon 4G, which premiered on Sprint last year. Both phones have angled corners, though the Photon Q lacks the Photon 4G's useful kickstand. The Photon Q's angled corners make it comfortable to hold while making calls, and the phone is compact enough to fit easily into most pockets. The Photon Q is largely composed of a soft plastic that feels good to the touch, though I was hoping that the phone would be wrapped in Kevlar like the Droid Razr and the Droid Razr Maxx.

The front of the phone accommodates a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera and a 4.3-inch 540-by-960-resolution display that uses the same Color Boost technology we saw on the Motorola Atrix HD. Motorola claims that Color Boost gives smartphones 50 percent more pixels than the leading smartphone offers, though the Photon Q's screen wasn't as sharp as the ones on the Samsung Galaxy S III, Atrix HD, or HTC One X. (It did look sharper and more vibrant than the screen on the Motorola Droid Bionic, however.) Like the Galaxy Nexus and the Atrix HD, the Photon Q uses Ice Cream Sandwich's virtual navigation buttons in the place of physical ones.

The back of the Photon Q holds an 8-megapixel camera and the phone's external speaker. The Photon Q uses a 1785mAh embedded battery; embedded batteries are supposed to last longer, but you can't replace the battery yourself if it ever becomes damaged or unable to hold much charge.

Along the left spine are the Photon Q's charging port and MicroHDMI port. The right spine of the phone hosts the volume rocker, a physical camera button, and a small flap covering the MicroSD card slot.

The Keyboard

The last keyboard-equipped phone I reviewed, the Motorola Droid 4, carried an above-average mobile keyboard with top-notch buttons. The Photon Q's keyboard is virtually identical to the Droid 4's. The keys are set slightly too close together for my taste, but the buttons felt great under my fingers as I typed. The only button I had a problem with was the spacebar, which emitted an audible cracking noise every time I pressed it. Though the button worked, but the sound it made was a bit unsettling.

Performance

Powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon S4 processor with 1GB of RAM, the Photon Q handled virtually everything I threw at it without a hitch. Even when scrolling through content-heavy pages, the phone rarely slowed down perceptibly, except when the browser tried to load a high-resolution image or video. Even then, I could keep multiple apps open and running simultaneously in the background without slowing the device to a crawl.

If you're a big mobile gamer, you'll appreciate that the Photon Q can handle most games available in the Play Store. One bonus of having a physical keyboard is that some games and emulators let you map specific actions to specific keys. The arrangement isn't perfect, but it's a huge step up from having to use a virtual control pad.

Call quality over Sprint's network left a lot to be desired: Voices sounded a bit muffled, and I heard a low buzzing noise whenever someone spoke. You and your caller will be able to hear each other, but you may have to speak up a bit to make yourself heard clearly. I tested the phone in our San Francisco office—an area with good reception. Since call quality varies depending on your location, you should consult coverage maps to get an idea of how good the call quality will be in your area.

The Photon Q is one of just a handful of phones that can connect to Sprint's new LTE network. Unfortunately, that network has yet to launch in San Francisco, so I couldn't test the phone's speeds on it. On Sprint's current 3G network over a strong 3G connection, the Photon Q managed an average download speeds of 0.49 megabit per second and an average upload speed of 0.86 mbps, according to my measurements using the FCC-approved Ookla Speed Test app.

Even with LTE turned on, the Photon Q held out over the better part of a day (about 5.5 hours) of normal use—including sending text messages, downloading a few apps, and playing a game or two for several minutes at a time—before the battery ran out of juice. We haven't yet run the Photon Q through our official PCWorld Labs suite of battery tests; when we do, we'll update this page.

The Photon Q does have an NFC chip, so you'll be able to take advantage of any software that may use that technology.

Software

Swiping upward on certain app icons will present you with new information.The Photon Q ships with Android 4.0.4 beneath a custom Motorola overlay. I used a Motorola phone back in the days when the company relied on MotoBlur, and this new overlay is leaps and bounds better. For the most part, the operating system looks and behaves like Android Ice Cream Sandwich, with just a few tweaks.

Some app icons have little arrows next to them that you can swipe to pop up a small "quick-look" window. Depending on the app, these windows display different information. For example, swiping the Browser app icon will pop up a grid that displays your bookmarks, but swiping the Email app icon will show your inbox and identify the number of unread emails you have. The fact that Motorola Mobility (the part of the company that makes phones) is now a subsidiary of Google may have led Motorola to exercise some restraint in tricking out its overlay, but in any case I'm glad that the new overlay doesn't change the look and feel of Android too drastically.

The Photon Q comes with two preloaded Sprint apps (Sprint ID and Sprint Zone) that can't be uninstalled, but I applaud the carrier for keeping the quantity of preloaded apps to a minimum.

Entertainment

With only Sprint's snail's-pace 3G network to connect to, and without widespread LTE coverage, you probably won't be streaming many HD movies to your phone unless you live in one of the 15 areas in the United States that currently have Sprint LTE. It'll be a while before the rest of us can connect to that faster network.

If you hate "the cloud" and want to keep all of your media locally on your device, you'll probably want to invest in a MicroSD card. The Photon Q offers 8GB of built-in storage, but that fills up pretty quickly once you start downloading apps and taking pictures.

The rear speaker on the phone delivers decent sound; but for higher-quality audio, I recommend using headphones.

Camera

I wasn't particularly impressed with the photos I got from the Photon Q's 8-megapixel camera. They tended to be a bit dark, and colors looked washed out. The Photon Q's Camera app provides few extras, though the phone does have a zero-shutter-lag camera courtesy of Android 4.0. The front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera works well for video calls and is clear enough that you can use it to take a quick Facebook self-portrait.

The Photon Q can record video in 1080p, though footage looked a tad too dark. Audio pickup was slightly muffled, probably due to the location of the microphone (it's on the bottom half of the phone to the right of the keyboard).

Overall, the Photon Q's camera isn't the best I've seen, but it's adequate. Indoor photos may come out looking rather dark, so try to avoid shooting in poorly lit areas. The phone's video quality is quite good, but don't expect it to pick up every bit of audio from whatever you are recording.

Bottom Line

Though a bit on the chunky side and hampered by a mediocre camera, the Photon Q is a solid choice for anyone who wants a phone with a physical keyboard. If you're a huge texter, or if you compose a lot of email messages on your phone, this model is well worth considering. It's not perfect, but the Photon Q is currently the keyboard phone to beat.

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