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Motorola first demonstrated its Q communicator last summer, and the smartphone was supposed to ship this past January, but didn't; reportedly because Motorola needed time to improve its keyboard/software integration. Now comes word from the number two mobile phone vendor's President & CEO Ed Zander that the long-awaited Q should finally find its way into users' hands sometime next week, according to a report by the IDG News Service.

Zander spoke at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in San Francisco. He emphasized the Q's role as a enterprise tool. At next week's launch - no specific date was given - Motorola will be joined by IBM, Electronic Data Systems, Microsoft, and Verizon Wireless.

The Q has caught the imagination, it seems, more than any other communicator-class Windows Mobile 5.0 device. Communicators are compact smartphones with QWERTY thumb-keyboards and other advanced features that are built in the mold of RIM’s BlackBerry and Palm’s Treo. Although the Q hadn't been released yet, numerous vendors conspicuously used the smartphone to demonstrate their applications at CTIA Wireless 2006, about the same time theFederal Communications Commission (FCC) finally approved it for release in the U.S.

Like the Palm Treo 700w and new 700p, the RAZR-thin Q will be offered first by Verizon for its CDMA network, with support for high-speed EVDO (Evolution Data Optimized) broadband, which averages data connection speeds of 400 to 700 kbps.

Motorola plans to follow the CDMA/EVDO Q with a GSM/UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) 3G (comparable performance to EVDO) edition, so operators in Europe and Asia—let alone customers of carriers like Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile in the United States—can get their chance at the new smartphone, by the end of the year, according to Zander.

A HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) version of the Q, the next step in GSM 3G beyond UMTS, may even be in the cards as well.

The Motorola Q measures 4.6 x 2.5 x 0.45 inches and should arrive with Microsoft's Direct Push technology for push e-mail support with Microsoft Exchange.

Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney told IDG he thinks this is a weak point for the Q. To him there's an upcoming push e-mail battle-royal between the Q, market-leader BlackBerry, Treo, and Nokia's new E61 communicator.

"Microsoft has underdelivered with the capabilities of its e-mail client," Dulaney said to IDG. Corporate users experienced in BlackBerry will "throw it back," he added.

Prosumers - those who buy the device themselves - are an important demographic for the Q, because of the competition's head start in the enterprise, according Dulaney.

Additional features of the Q include a 320 x 240-pixel screen, dual speakers, Bluetooth for personal area networking (connecting to headsets, printers) and a 1.3 megapixel camera with photo lighting for picture and video. There's a miniSD slot for storage expansion, 64 MB of RAM plus 128 MB of Flash ROM, as well as a 5-way navigation button and thumb wheel.

We got to handle several Qs at CTIA and our initial impressions were positive, although we would have hoped that Motorola made it a Pocket PC Phone with a touch screen and other features that would entail and not a Windows Smartphone.