With prices coming down on popular cell phones, you'll undoubtedly start to see more people carrying the Motorola Q.

The Q is a competent combination cell phone/personal digital assistant -- a breed known to the industry as the smart phone. Smart because you don't have to carry two devices; smart because your address book gets synchronized with your computer every time you synchronize your PDA. Although not perfect, the Q offers the mobile warrior a variety of tools that he may need and want while out of the office.

First, the Q is a full-featured cell phone -- complete with a large address book that lets you punch in a couple of characters from the middle of a name or phone number to search for that contact; then dial with a single click. Most cell phones make you start from the beginning of the name or number.

Like most high-end cell phones, it has a camera; this one is able to capture photos up to 1.2 megapixels with a 6x zoom -- good enough to capture the moment when you don't want to carry a separate camera.

The PDA is based on Windows-mobile, which is fine for standard contacts management, calendar management and task management -- but the Q doesn't include Pocket Excel or Pocket Word, which you find on many other Windows Mobile devices. That means you can't manipulate spreadsheets or create word processing documents on your PDA. Frankly you wouldn't want to try, because the Q doesn't use a stylus to enter data or navigate. Your interface with the PDA is strictly buttons and knobs.

For a lot of users, this makes it very handy because you don't have to worry about losing the stylus, and it's easy to navigate with one hand. Unfortunately, the lack of stylus means some applications won't work. For instance, Franklin-Covey's PlanPlus Prioritized Tasks and the very popular Pocket Informant information management software can't be used -- even though both products run on Windows Mobile.

Just like with other small devices, the people who engineered the Q had to make some trade-offs. They managed to include an entire QWERTY keyboard on the face of the phone, but the buttons are very small. Plus, to guard them against being pressed by accident, the phone slips into its holster facing inward, which means you can't glance down at the holstered device to see who is calling. You must remove it to look at the face of the phone.

One of the powers of the Q is the combination PDA and cell phone -- which means you can check your e-mail or even send it fairly easily from the road -- just like you might do with a BlackBerry device. If you're a true data junkie, you'll love the fact that it can connect to the high-speed Verizon EV-DO data network.

The interesting issue with the Q is that the designers have incorporated some great ideas that you rarely find, yet at the same time have shorted the user in other areas. The good include a solid, slim body, room for extra flash memory (to store photos, sound files and contacts), and the ability to use either Bluetooth or standard wired headphones. The pains include the backward holster, the small keys and the lack of stylus. So you'll need to figure out which of these items is most important to you before shelling out your dollars for the Q.

If you decide to buy it, though, you'll own a solid workhorse that lets you stay better connected, while roaming whereever you can find cell service.

First Published: March 31, 2007, 4:00 a.m.