Motorola's slimline smart phone, the Q, may not appear until early April, having missed the December launch window hinted at by company CEO Ed Zander in September 2005. When Motorola announced the Q in July 2005, it said the machine would ship in Q1 2006.

The would-be Blackberry beater's original launch window is still open, of course. But Engadget, citing "a highly reliable source", reports the Q will appear just after the quarter has come to a close. There's no indication as to why the smart phone may miss the publicly stated deadline.

That the Q might appear early was a prospect raised by Zndr while talking to reporters after a speaking engagement.

Motorola's pitch for the Q is that it will be the "thinnest, lightest" handset with an integrated QWERTY keypad. It measures 11.5 x 6.3 x 1.1cm, which is certainly thinner than the 2cm-thick Palm Treo 650 and the 1.8cm-thick RIM Blackberry 7780, though the Palm device's face is smaller. Unlike the Treo, the Q has no antenna stub.

The Q's display is a 2.4in, 320 x 240, 65,536-colour job, and the handset also incorporates a 1.3 megapixel digicam with a flash. There's a Mini SD slot for memory expansion, and Bluetooth for wireless connectivity. The keypad is backlit, and Motorola has built in speakerphone capability. The device will run Windows Mobile 5.0. ®