Our full Motorola Cliq 2 review has arrived! Is a business-conscious Android smartphone the way to go for T-Mobile customers?
Motorola Cliq 2 Overview
It's T-Mobile's turn for a power-packed Android business-conscious smartphone, and the brand new Motorola Cliq 2 is a major emergence from within the depths of the professional mobile device arsenal. A sizable departure from its predecessor, the Motorola Cliq, the Cliq 2 features a revamped build, Android 2.2 with Adobe Flash Player Support, a speedy 1GHz processor, and more exclusive goodies, courtesy of an enhanced MOTOBLUR experience. It retains its 5-megapixel camera, but delivers a camera interface that patches up the bugs we found within the original Cliq's camera interface.
One of the highlights about the phone was its ability to handle a cavalcade of social networking, gaming, impressive Internet browsing, and other applications from the Android Market. However, this was at the sacrifice of a very stingy battery, so if you are heavy on your overall phone usage, you're going to need an extra charger or two. But there are so many nifty little tricks the Motorola Cliq 2 is capable of, so hold onto your hats and let's go for a ride.
Design
The most pertinent renovation on the Cliq 2 is its redesigned slide-out QWERTY keyboard, which is tailored to resemble a honeycomb in a beehive. Although this unconventional keyboard design creates some aesthetical buzz, the rubberized keys were a joy to press, and typing became one of our favorite activities on it. At first, we were baffled by unused space along the left and right sides of the keys, but Motorola purposely crammed the keys closer to one another to contribute to speedier input. The keyboard hinge system is also one of the more solidly designed within its class. Rather than awkwardly crawl out like the Motorola Droid 2's or HTC EVO Shift 4G's, the Cliq 2's keyboard snaps into place like a nice whip crack—the way a phone keyboard should function, and a definite improvement from the original Cliq keyboard.
The phone makes full use of its 3.7-inch 854 x 480-pixel capacitive touchscreen by stretching it out to the very edges of the phone's rather narrow frame. What we have is a high-resolution screen that is geared for handling high-definition Blockbuster movies and 3D gaming. The diminutive band of Menu, Home, Back, and Search haptic feedback buttons are a trifle too small as a result of the LCD's larger real estate, but it's a welcome sacrifice, as we'd rather have a larger monitor. It features a standard set of external controls, consisting of a naked USB terminal, Power/Lock button, 3.5mm audio jack, volume control, and Camera button. The Motorola Cliq 2 also has a Silent lock switch, which allowed us to set the phone to Silent without having to unlock the screen.
The backside of the Cliq 2 is where the 5-megapixel camera lens and LED flash live, and this is also where things start to get cheap. The back panel on the phone is quite flimsy and difficult to remove and replace. We like the grooved pattern on the back, but every time we went to remove the panel, we felt as though the plastic would crack in half. The 2GB MicroSD and SIM cards live with the BP6X Motorola battery in back, and the Cliq 2 can hold up to 32GB of MicroSD card storage. The phone is definitely an improvement on the original Cliq, and one of the better designed slide-out QWERTYs on the market.
Software and Interface
Like most high-end smartphones these days, the Cliq 2 combines a speedy 1GHz processor with Android 2.2 for an enhanced navigational experience, including compatibility with Flash 10.1 content. But it's the MOTOBLUR experience that ramps the Cliq 2 beyond some of its competitors like the Motorola Droid 2 and T-Mobile G2. When used properly, MOTOBLUR is one of the premiere social networking interfaces within the smartphone world. But with great power comes great responsibility, and we highly recommend throttling back the aggregation of contacts and accounts in MOTOBLUR, or else madness will ensue.
For instance, MOTOBLUR supports Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Photobucket, and more when it comes to accounts. MOTOBLUR will ask to integrate all accounts into one gigantic contact list that synchs together, and we even have the ability to utilize a Universal Inbox that combines all of our messages and status updates into one. This can be exceedingly time-consuming and daunting, so be sure to enable synch on only the accounts and contacts you care about. The Cliq 2 offers widgets that allowed us to set favorite contacts for quick correspondence, and the Social Networking Widget featured status updates and let us contact anyone via Facebook, email, phone, text message, or more from right within the widget.
All Work and All Play
While the Cliq 2 can be a veritable social networking tool, it also flaunts some new features for the business-minded. First, we get Quickoffice for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and PDF documents, coupled with the nice slide-out QWERTY. There's also the Cliq 2's Calendar management, which allowed us to create specific events and email or text them to colleagues, propose new meeting times, reply and reply-to all groups, forward meeting notices and check meeting participant availability. LinkedIn helped us stay connected within the corporate directory, and the Cliq 2 could be connected to a laptop or other device for Internet via a 3G mobile hotspot. IT departments will have the ability to remotely locate the phone and wipe the SD card, and more security features, including SD card encryption will be available as a software upgrade early this year.
So what about fun? The Cliq 2 has access to the redesigned Android Market, which houses over 100,000 applications, including our favorite, Angry Birds. It offers BLOCKBUSTER ONDEMAND for movie downloads, eBooks via the Amazon Kindle application, Amazon MP3 for music downloads, and the T-Mobile App Pack. Of course, Google Maps for GPS, Gmail, Talk, and more Google applications are preloaded, and the Cliq 2 even supports Wi-Fi calling for better reception and minimized minute usage. We loved the internet browser for its enhanced swipe-worthy Bookmarks graphics in landscape mode with the QWERTY out, and the phone's 3D chip allowed us to rip it up with Raging Thunder 2. The phone has Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, and DLNA for connecting to home devices and streaming media. If you're not convinced that the Cliq 2 is about as packed as you can get for a QWERTY slider, then you're going to need some serious help trying to find a device that can beat it by a landslide.
Call Quality/Battery Life
Calls were not the Cliq 2's forte. For the most part, the phone did a significant job suppressing background noise, but it's definitely not a noise canceling system. A light background blanket of white/static noise was also evident from within the phone, and we hope that had something to do with the connection or quality of the other parties' devices and units. The call quality on our Motorola Cliq 2 review unit was still an improvement from the Cliq, however, and it's not a deal breaker at all. Our discerning ears have heard better, though.
Battery life is another department you're going to have to supervise closely on this phone. Motorola promises 8 hours of talk time, but we found that number to be a bit farfetched, especially with the multitude of applications being run at once. We really had to dive into the Task Manager and going on a killing spree in order to conserve battery life. Even Android Market applications like Mobile Andrio put a strain on the battery. When we disabled Wi-Fi and kept the gaming to a minumum, the Cliq 2 exhibited a mediocre battery performance. A lot of it was standby time as well, so you'll just have to invest in a few extra chargers in order to keep this thing juiced throughout the day.
Camera
We liked the original Cliq's imagine performance, but its camera interface was buggy as hell. Fortunately, the Cliq 2's camera interface never gave us any problems this time around, and image quality from the 5-megapixel camera was amongst the better phones in its class. Bright light macros were fantastic for a phone at this point in time, and colors were accurate. Even in moderate low light, this phone can hold its own with a bit of noise, but when we dropped the lights significantly, the noise went wild. Fortunately, the flash saved us from imminent lack of exposure death, but we're seen better flash performance from other phones.
The phone can record 720 x 480 Widescreen VGA videos, and to be honest, we preferred them to most of the phones that flaunt 720p HD videos and fail to deliver on quality. Its video quality was some of the best we've seen—even in low light, and stereo audio pickup was great. So what if it's not HD—it doesn't look like crap, and that's all that matters. The Cliq 2 has a robust camera interface with Scene modes, Image Effects, manual controls, and sharing capabilities that make it a breeze to transfer images and videos to social networking sites. There's also a Print to Retail function that searches all of the compatible stores in the area and allows the phone to connect and print wirelessly right from within a store such as CVS. The Cliq 2 gets the thumbs up from us when it comes to its camera.
T-Mobile's first attempt to bring a business-conscious Android smartphone to its customers is a success. The Cliq 2 channels Annie Oakley and spouts "Anything you can do, I can do better!" Well, maybe not better in all departments, but the phone is definitely one of the most equipped road warriors on the market. Mad Max would be proud.
With advanced business features like Quickoffice, Calendar, and IT capability, the Cliq 2 is definitely an option for smaller businesses looking for an alternative to the Motorola Droid 2 or a Blackberry. The smartphone is also a fierce social networking device that excels with a great internet browser, advanced gaming, an impressive camera, and oodles of multimedia content.
Although the phone's call quality was not top-notch and the battery life was subpar, the Cliq 2 is testament to the company's effort to improve upon the original Cliq, update with the times, and provide a power-packed QWERTY slider for T-Mobile customers who have pined for a Droid 2, but were locked in a contract. The Cliq 2 is definitely a quality phone, and should not be overlooked when shopping for a new device.
Release Date
The Motorola Cliq 2 will be available from T-Mobile on January 19.
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