At the GigaOm Mobilize conference in San Francisco today, Motorola announced their first phone to use Google's Android operating system. We got our hands on the Motorola Cliq at a special event after the conference. We walked away from the device impressed, much more with some of the interface designs than with the actual phone hardware itself.
The Motorola Cliq will be available on T-Mobile by the holiday season, and marks the third Android phone on the carrier's lineup. The new Moto Cliq will run a special, customized brand of Google's Android UI, the new Motoblur platform. Like the HTC Hero running HTC's Sense UI concept, the Motorola Cliq runs a custom interface with advanced capabilities beyond the basic Google Android platform and homescreen widgets designed by Motorola to improve the phone's interaction with social networks.
Getting our hands blurry
In our hands on tests, Motoblur didn't dig in as deep as we initially expected, and most of the improvements Motorola has made are literally skin deep, as they rest on the 5-panel homescreen and offer information as widgets on the top level screens. But that's the point. You won't have to dive deep to find the most recent status updates, or photo uploads or even calendar events. More importantly, you won't have to open a Web browser, a dedicated, unique app for Facebook, a separate Twitter app and another for MySpace. The Motorola Motoblur platform lets you view most updates from the main screen in a unified, modern-looking format, and if you want to send out your own message en masse, you can send to multiple social networks at once. Motorola reps walked us through the process, and it worked quite intuitively, relying on simple drop down menus to distribute your own microblog.
Social networking seemed to be the name of the game for Motorola's comeback device, as device pricing was left out of this conversation. Instead, Motorola focused on the phone's ability to aggregate and organize a variety of social networks on a single platform. This seemed quite similar to Palm's Synergy concept on the Palm Pre, which collects and organizes contacts and messaging information from a small collection of social networking services. In our hands on time with the Motoblur platform, the integration seemed to go much deeper than on the Pre. While Palm's Synergy does a great job aggregating and organizing your address book, Motoblur goes even farther, so that the entire phone is about collecting and distributing incoming information from your social networks. There are, of course, a whole slew of other apps on the phone, and you can also access the Google App Market, but you have to dig just a little to get beyond the social networking features.
More hardware, please
So, the Motorola Cliq will be the first phone based on the Motoblur Android platform, but Motorola made clear this would be the first of many hardware releases over the next 15 months or so. In fact, there will even be another Motoblur phone available during the coming holiday season, but Motorola didn't make any details official, just yet.
The Motorola Cliq uses a 3.1-inch, capacitive touchscreen display running at HVGA resolution, or 480 by 320 pixels. In our hands on look at the pre-production units Motorola was showing off, we weren't terribly impressed by the responsiveness of the new interface. Even at the busy homescreen, it seemed to lag a bit as we flicked our finger back and forth to check out alternate panels. Of course, we've heard that HTC's Hero device, running a similar Android platform with a more significant graphical boost, benefited greatly from an early software update, so perhaps Motorola can also work out these kinks for a smoother experience.
The phone gets a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, and it will also be able to shoot video at 24fps in the same HVGA resolution. Like previous Google Android phones we've seen, the Motorola Cliq will get GPS and an electronic compass built in. The Cliq will also run on T-Mobile's 3G network, or you can sync the phone using built-in Wi-Fi.
Keeping you on the home screen
Among the more interesting interface enhancements we saw today were the new Widgets that Motorola has built to run on the device homescreen. The phone presents various status updates and feeds from various social networks, and these are features in a great looking graphical pane with photos and text mixed. If you want to reply or comment on one of the friend feeds, status updates, wall posts or photos that come your way in this "Happenings" app and widget, you can reply at once to any of the supported social networks.
The phone hardware itself wasn't terribly impressive. The Motorola Cliq is a nice looking phone, and the build is solid, but it isn't the tightest fitting slider we've encountered. The keyboard was fine, not bad, but not nearly as impressive as HTC's Touch Pro2 phone. Instead of a trackball, the Motorola Cliq will use a simpler 4-way button.
The phone doesn't yet support multi-touch, but Motorola reps hinted that the two-finger feature would be a possibility after future Google Android updates, most notably the distant Android 2.0 update, adds multi-touch support to the phones with capacitive screens. Of note, the Motorola Cliq is not an official "with Google" phone, though it's still a legitimate Android device. But with the Motoblur platform, the phone will need to receive software updates directly from Motorola, and it won't be able to handle the over-the-air system updates that Google has offered. Still, the Motorola Motoblur platform will provide full support for Android App Market apps, and will even use such standards as the Amazon MP3 store.
Where, when and how much?
The Motorola Cliq will be available in the U.S. through T-Mobile, and the official release date is November 2. T-Mobile's price tag will be $200 with a two-year contract. Motorola will also be offering the phone worldwide under the Motorola Dext brand name.
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