Motorola's new Android phone comes to T-Mobile with Facebook and Twitter leading the charge. Enough for real status addicts? Check out our Motorola CLIQ review.
Review summary of the Motorola Cliq:
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 The Motorola CLIQ is the perfect phone for the true social networking junkie. If you like being bombarded with information from your friends, followers and favorite Web sites, the Motorola CLIQ does the best job keeping you in touch with everything. It can be daunting at times, with faces on your desktop changing at random and text bubbles popping up from everywhere. You can customize, since this is Android, but Motorola hasn't done much beyond the deep social networking integration. Besides the frenetic status updates, it's a fairly basic Google Android system, and a disappointing piece of hardware, as well. The phone design lacks any of the tight fitting lines and striking angles of Motorola's RAZR legacy, and instead feels wobbly and cheap, a real disappointment. The Motorola CLIQ isn't as refined as other modern smartphones, notably the HTC Hero or Palm Pre, but it's the perfect phone for a real social networking fiend, and we think that's a growing audience. Release: October 2009. Price: $200.
Pros: Keep all your status updates for all your networks and feeds up top. Easy to update multiple networks at once. Great custom widgets for Android.
Cons: Wobbly hardware design made touchscreen use frustrating. Phone was a bit buggy or unresponsive at times. Battery life poor. Multimedia experience sub-par on Android.
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Full Motorola Cliq Review:
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Design – Good
While the Motorola RAZR was a sharp-edged, tight-fitting clamshell with a seamless look and a solid feel, the Motorola CLIQ seems to have come from a completely different design study, for better and for worse. The phone jiggles like Jell-O, and though the slide mechanism felt sharp, the top and bottom half don't seem to fit together well, and the display moved quite a bit while we were tapping it. It was a completely unpleasant experience, and if we had purchased this phone, the poorly fitting design would have been a dealbreaker for us. The Palm Pre similarly wobbles a bit, but only while sliding, not when it's in position. The bottom half of the Motorola CLIQ is a bit larger than the top. At first we thought this ugly design choice was a mistake, but the labels for the Power button and camera shutter button are only visible because of this misalignment, so it must be on purpose.
The Motorola CLIQ uses the MOTOBLUR interface, basically a touched-up Google Android interface design with a few new desktop widgets. Unlike HTC's Sense experience on the Sprint Hero, Motorola hasn't added much to the basic calling and other app functions, most of the legwork has been done with an excellent set of desktop widgets. With enigmatic names like "Happenings" and "News," Motorola's MOTOBLUR interface uses a set of very active, live updating widgets to keep feeding you status updates from MySpace, Facebook and Twitter; news from your favorite RSS feeds; messages from your e-mail and text messaging accounts and more. When you first start the phone, there are literally three conversations going on at once on the middle home screen, all with their own avatar and speech balloon. And that's just 1 of 5 separate screens that you can fill with widgets, icons and smart folders.
Sound daunting? Google's Android OS already allowed extensive desktop use and loads of customization options. By relying on the phone's desktop, Motorola keeps you from having to open up 4 or 5 different apps to check all of this information separately. While Palm is bragging about multi-tasking, and the iPhone can only perform one task at once, the Motorola CLIQ gives you all the information you require without performing any tasks at all. Oh, the phone is working hard behind the scenes, and battery life takes an obvious toll, but MOTOBLUR on the Motorola CLIQ is a powerful, fully-loaded way to skim through a deluge of incoming information.
Calling - Very Good
Call quality on the Motorola CLIQ was pretty good, and though we wish that Motorola had done more with the calling interface, our conversations sounded great on the CLIQ. Reception wasn't very good. The Motorola CLIQ regularly switched to EGDE networking even while other T-Mobile phones we're testing retained their 3G connection. Battery life was also dismal. Though Motorola claims 6 hours of talking time, we ran out of juice half way through our first fully charged day with the phone, and actual talking time numbers hovered closer to 4 hours. We imagine that the constant updating takes its toll on the Motorola CLIQ, because the battery seems large enough in capacity, but the phone doesn't measure up.
The Motorola CLIQ synchronizes all of your contacts from every contacts-enabled account. It pulled our address book from our Exchange server account, and also from Gmail and Facebook. Unfortunately, it even pulled our Twitter friends into our global address book. This highlights a problem we had with the Motorola CLIQ. Motorola just doesn't seem to know how we use our messaging services. Though every user probably wants to use their networks differently, the CLIQ doesn't adapt well to other users' tastes. Thus, it's tough to exclude folks you follow on Twitter from your address book, and the Motorola CLIQ doesn't do a great job prioritizing information. It's easy to search your contacts quickly, you can just start typing from the main screen. But we'd like some easy customization options for our contacts list.
Otherwise, the Motorola CLIQ has a nice stable of calling features. The speakerphone was quite loud, and it worked well both for calls and for occasional music playback. The phone uses voice dialing so you can make calls hands-free. There's even a Visual Voicemail app from T-Mobile for their Android devices. You can make conference calls with the Motorola CLIQ, but it was an unreliable process, and the phone couldn't complete the new call every time.
Messaging – Very Good
The Motorola CLIQ goes far beyond simple messaging on a device. Instead, the phone becomes a portal to your entire social networking world. Unfortunately, once you try to dive deep into the messaging features, the MOTOBLUR interface comes up short. It's great for simply reading messages. You get a partial view on your desktop, and then click for a larger window, where you can then flick to and from the next messages. It seems daunting at first, but becomes intuitive after a while, though it was always overwhelming. But if you want to do more than simply update your status, if you want to send a picture or location information, or perform other more complicated tasks, the basic MOTOBLUR widgets don't hold up, and you'll still have to open a Web page or a 3rd party app.
One humorous problem we had was with accidental posting. The Motorola CLIQ can post to multiple accounts at once. We're usually against this practice, but we know plenty of folks who post the same message to Facebook and Twitter at once. A couple times during our test run, the Motorola CLIQ somehow opened the messaging app and wrote out a gibberish status, all while sitting closed in our pocket. Once, it even sent that status to update Twitter and Facebook with nonsense.
Instant messaging is a neglected step-child here. The phone features support for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk, the basics for the Android platform. But the Motorola CLIQ is drawing information from so many other networks, why not let users chat as well? We'd like to see Facebook and MySpace chatting, all integrated as tightly as the rest of the features are tied into the system.
The slide-out QWERTY keyboard on the Motorola CLIQ was pretty good. We prefer a more soft touch to our keys, like our favorite keyboard on the HTC Touch Pro2, but we liked the nicely rounded keys and wide layout on the CLIQ. The Search button on the keyboard did give us some trouble. We accidentally pressed it a few times while aiming for a nearby key, and this always caused trouble on the app above.
Multimedia - Good
Motorola has done very little to enhance the multimedia experience on Android, and that's too bad, because Android could use a swift kick in the musical pants and Motorola has good experience with multimedia phones. The phone had no trouble finding and playing our music files and videos. But the interface design was boring and static, and the media player lacked the fine controls and additional features of other multimedia smartphones, especially Apple's iPhone. It should be easier and more enjoyable to organize your music and create playlists right on your device. Thankfully, the Motorola CLIQ gets solid music hardware, with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack and an internal microSD slot that can handle cards up to 32GB capacity (though the phone only ships with a 2GB card).
Video playback also should have been much better. The screen on the Motorola CLIQ was okay, nothing to write home about. The resolution is on par with the iPhone's screen, though HTC and others have been releasing phones with many more pixels on the display. In our tests, the Motorola CLIQ was able to play videos perfectly formatted for the screen's resolution, but it couldn't downsize larger videos to fit, which was annoying. Videos looked good, but not fantastic, and we saw some blockiness and pixelation on the CLIQ's screen. If you're looking for a real PMP tucked inside a cell phone, the Apple iPhone is still the reigning champ.
Web browsing – Very Good
The Web browser on the Motorola CLIQ is the standard Android WebKit browser, which is a pretty good app. Web pages looked great rendered with the Browser, and though the Motorola CLIQ doesn't have multi-touch like the Sprint Hero, but there are some good onscreen controls to help with zooming and panning around large pages. The browser was a bit sluggish in our tests, though, so there was some delay in zooming and scanning a page with the mini map turned on. Even so, most of our favorite pages loaded quickly either over T-Mobile's fast 3G network, or over our own home Wi-Fi connection.
GPS navigation – Very Good
Turn-by-turn navigation on the Motorola CLIQ is provided by TeleNav, and the navigation app worked pretty well in our tests. The point-of-interest database had no trouble finding our destination and pointing us in the right direction. There wasn't much we could do to control the map screen once we were on our way, and we'd like more gesture sensitive zooming and panning controls. TeleNav's app looked pretty good on the CLIQ's display, but this isn't the best version of TeleNav we've seen. Their Sprint Navigator app on Sprint's Hero and other devices looks more refined, with some added visual input to make navigation easier.
Camera - Good
The 5-megapixel shooter on the Motorola BLUR took some nice pictures, and one or two may have been print-worthy, but mostly it gave us trouble. First of all, the lens placement is terrible. The camera lens is so close to the edge of the phone that it was easy to block with our finger. Second, the camera was very buggy. It was constantly freezing and crashing, and we missed plenty of good shots because the camera couldn't get its act together and fire. Finally, though image quality was good, especially at a distant zoom, at full crop details would tend to fall apart, and our images had a videotaped look that told us there were problems in the camera's post-processing. Indoor shots were also fuzzy, with lots of noise jumbled into our pics, and the lack of a flash will hurt users who want to take pics of night scenes and dimly lit saloons. Check out our image samples below:
Noisy Snail
Spam Quesadillas and More
Shooting Game
Texas Star
Chicken Fried Bacon
Self Portrait
Price and availability
The Motorola CLIQ will be available from T-Mobile as of November 2 for $200 with a contract agreement.
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