Moto Q Amp'd Edition

It's no secret that 18 to 24 year olds aren't the most fiscally responsible bunch--an irrepressible thirst for media and a proclivity toward early adoption of new technologies can make for constant cash hemorrhages--but few companies have managed to seize onto Ritalin-chomping millennials quite as tightly as Amp'd Mobile. Merging the media-centric Moto Q smart phone with the a la carte Amp'd Live content-delivery service ensures that media hounds will never be left wanting for a fix.
 
Aside from the granite-colored casing, which meshes well with Amp'd Mobile's color palette, the Moto Q retains all of the slender good looks that made it famous with both Sprint and Verizon Wireless. The large 320 x 240-pixel screen is just as sharp and sprawling as ever; and the spacious QWERTY keyboard accommodates even the meatiest of frat-boy fingers. The scroll wheel and Back button sit along the right edge, while a miniSD slot and USB port occupy the left. One the back, a 1.3-megapixel camera and flash lay flush against the Moto Q's sleek spine.  Also on the back you'll find a pair of powerful stereo speakers.
 
The Moto Q's guts remain largely unaltered. Windows Mobile 5 is again the operating system of choice, which means easy Outlook synching, Internet Explorer Mobile, and the ability to view e-mail attachments (not that this crowd cares about that). More important are features like Windows Media Player Mobile and stereo Bluetooth for enjoying music and video clips with a set of wireless headphones. 
 
The Moto Q's battery life still leaves room for improvement, however. We got slightly more than the rated four hours of talk time throughout our downloading and Web-surfing frenzy, which forced us to recharge about every day. 
 
The most notable change is the addition of Amp'd Live, a combination front-end, content-delivery, and organization system with a graffiti-inspired design. The Amp'd Live user interface is based on Adobe's Flash Lite technology, and while it was responsive, it often caused internal software errors, which can be quite annoying unless you disable error notifications. Once we did, though, the interface performed more smoothly.
 
Using Amp'd Live, you can purchase and download media with a few clicks and then access your media through the My Stuff button. We liked that the system doesn't force you to go searching for downloaded media. Additionally, help, search, and Web-browsing functions are all built directly into the Amp'd Live menu. Amp'd Live's pricing is reasonable: Amp'd Overload costs $15 per month and gives you unlimited access to more than 20 Amp'd Live Video channels. The upgraded Amp'd Overdose costs $20 per month and includes unlimited access to more than 50 video channels, Amp'd TV, and Amp'd Radio.
 
Amp'd Mobile lives and dies by its edgy content, and to that end it delivers the goods. For example, Bikini Cocktails delivers video clips of scantily clad vixens demonstrating mixed-drink recipes. Amp'd Live's media library includes 26 live TV channels ($10/month a la carte), 55 video-on-demand channels like Adult Swim, Comedy Central, E!, and Fox Sports (starting at $1.99 per clip), 14 radio channels (also $10/month), one million downloadable songs (99 cents each), and a handful of games like Frogger, Galaga, and Pac-man ($3.99/month subscription).
 
In our initial tests, video streaming was spotty at best. Some TV channels came through with adequate frame rates, while others were veritable slideshows with audio. Once Amp’d Mobile reduced the bit rate of its video stream, content from channels like Fox Sports and E! and mtvU looked a little bit smoother, but audio and video was still not always in sync. We really like the media search function, which returned accurate results--a simple music query for "My Chemical Romance," for example, yielded a list of B sides and live performances. Your media gets stored to the included 256MB miniSD Card; each DRM-protected track takes up about 2MB of space. We recommend upgrading to a 2GB card (about $25), so you can fit more of your own music and downloaded videos.
 
Amp'd Mobile touts the Moto Q's social-networking capabilities, but they seem like an afterthought. Essentially, Amp'd just threw a handful of social-networking bookmarks (Facebook, Livejournal, and MySpace) into the Web browser and called it a day. We would have preferred the sites to be integrated into the Amp'd Live interface. Similarly, the Internet and IM section of Amp'd Live includes a series of links to mobile IM Web pages but no integrated clients. 
 
Thanks to the EV-DO data connection, pages like NYTimes.com and facebook.com loaded in less than ten seconds on our tests. Ringtones and graphics downloaded in just a few seconds, while larger downloads such as video or audio files took less than one minute. We did notice a lot of time-out errors, which required us to restart the download multiple times. As for voice quality, callers responded that we sounded clear both ways from all over Manhattan and New Jersey. That's not a surprise, given that Amp'd rides on Verizon's network.  
 
All in all, the idea of marrying the hippest mobile-content distributor this side of iTunes to a slick device like the Moto Q is a winner. We wish the Amp'd Live interface produced fewer error messages, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a better mix of multimedia features and available content on a smart phone.

 

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