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Unmaking Motorola's Q

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the under-the-hood dept.

conq writes "BusinessWeek has a breakdown of Motorola's Q Phone, looking at the cost of each of its components. From the article: 'It costs Motorola about $158 to build the phone. That includes components and assembly but excludes other expenses such as marketing, distribution, and licensing fees to Microsoft, which makes the phone's Windows Mobile operating system.' By comparaison, the BlackBerry 8700, only costs $123 according to the article. The difference between the two, the BlackBerry 'doesn't play video or music, and unlike the Q, it doesn't have a camera.'"

1 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Re:US Phone Market is so irrelevent by digitac · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually the driving force behind Blackberry features has traditionally been the government's need for security. The government has put strict requirements on the device to be sure it's secure. That's something I can appriciate.
    There are server-side policies for EVERYTHING. A rep once told a group of us that if we could find any way to get data off a Blackberry that couldn't be stopped/restricted by a policy on the server he'd buy us lunch and get it fixed. In an enterprise environment the admin can restrict everything.
    We can (and do) set password policies. Length, age, complexity, number of attempts can all be configured. There's even a distress feature so the device notifies an admin if the user is forced to unlock it (you change your password by one character). The admin could then send a wipe command to the device which completely wipes all data.
    It even has AES encrypted storage. If you turn that on, even if you unsolder the memory chip you can't read the data (though you could theoretically proceed to brute-force it).
    The lack of cameras on all Blackberries (is a God-send!) is due to the restrictions placed on cameras in senstive areas. If one Blackberry had a camera they may all be banned from those locations (rumor has it there may be one coming though, I hope not).
    No MP3s because it's a business first device. I personally don't agree with this one. I wish it would play WAV file voicemail (promised, never delivered). It doesn't have removable storage or even enough for more than a couple songs, but this relates back to the security issue. They can't be used to copy documents from a computer and it's near impossible to remove sensitive data from the device.
    It's not perfect, but at least it has a reason.

    Digitac