Motorola CLIQ Review

Introduction:

Motorola recently launched its first Android device, but despite the barrage of ads it is not, in fact, the DROID.  No, that honor would belong to the Motorola CLIQ, a sprite little messaging device designed around social networking.  The CLIQ sports Motorola’s MOTOBLUR interface, a customized skin for Android that bombards the user with news and entertainment updates, as well as integrating feeds from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others.  Other features include a 5 megapixel autofocus camera, 3.1” display, Wi-Fi, 3G and a full QWERTY keyboard.  In the box you’ll find:

•    Li-Ion battery
•    AC adapter with USB cable
•    3.5mm headphones
•    2GB microSD card

Design:

The CLIQ is without a doubt geared towards the younger generation, and the design embodies that.  It is on the small side, which means a smaller screen and keyboard, but is still heavy.  It has a good weight to it, but we’re not crazy about the feel.  When closed the slider is loose and when held by the bottom half the top piece will wiggle, but thankfully this goes away when opened.  Still, the CLIQ isn’t exactly what we’d call solid, and the cheap plastic housing doesn’t do much to reassure us.



You can compare the Motorola CLIQ with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The 3.1” capacitive HVGA display is quite nice.  The 262K colors offer more depth than screens we’ve seen from HTC and it is plenty responsive.   It’s a far cry from the DROID, but that is to be expected.  Below the display are physical Home, Menu and Search buttons.  On the left side is a vibrate toggle (something we’d love to see more of,) volume rocker and microUSB charging/data port.  The right side has the lock/power button and camera key.  The side keys are all very shallow and could use a bit more travel for reassurance.   The top simply features the 3.5mm headphone jack.



The back of the phone has a simple layout: the tiny 5MP camera sits up top and the single speaker is along the bottom.  On our white version the battery door has a random gathering of dimples for a stylized design.  On the titanium it is a carbon fiber-esque raised pattern.  We prefer the titanium version; on the white the gray door and keyboard do not mix well with the black and white design.  The two-tone titanium looks much more professional, whereas the white/black/gray will more likely appeal to a younger audience.



Sliding the phone open reveals the four row QWERTY keyboard.  The buttons are small and layout is not offset, but it wouldn’t be so bad if the bottom row was not concave.  The top three rows- containing the letters- have a good rounding to them that lets you easily distinguish between the keys when typing, but the bottom one- housing the spacebar, alt, sym, search and back keys- is concave, which causes your finger to just kind of fall into it.  The top three rows all have a very good click when pressed, but the bottom row does not.  This makes for an awful feel whenever going for the spacebar, which as you can imagine is quite often.



There are some elements we really like about the CLIQ’s design, most notably the size, but the build quality and keyboard leave much to be desired.  We realize that this is a mid-level device, but at the same $200 on contract as the rock-solid DROID we’d expect something nicer.

User Interface:

Motorola’s take on Android is what they call MOTOBLUR.  The user can sign into accounts from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Last.FM, Picasa, Photobucket, Yahoo! Mail and Google, as well as corporate and other personal email accounts.  Similarly to webOS, contacts are pulled from each location and merged together, and if a contact’s info isn’t recognized you can link to other services.  Thankfully info from one service does not get pushed back to another; for example if you have a Gmail contact who is also a Facebook contact and they have different email addresses with the two services, Gmail is not updated with the Facebook address.  Similarly to HTC’s contact management you can view your communication history within a contact, as well as their “happenings,” or social network updates.

The homescreen has several custom widgets as well.  The Happenings widget pulls all of this social network info and gives you a constant feed of updates.  Messaging offers your standard SMS, MMS, etc. but also integrates Facebook, Twitter and other messaging services.   There is also a News and Entertainment widget that displays relevant info.   Lastly is Social Status, which allows you to quickly update your status for the various services.  The best feature of these widgets is that a tap brings up more info right on the homescreen without launching an app.  For instance, if you tap on a news headline it will bring you a brief synopsis, with a link to launch the full story.  If you click on a Facebook profile update in Happenings it gives you the full text, ability to read any comments and the option to comment yourself.  On any of them you can swipe across the screen to get to the next item.



MOTOBLUR is not nearly as ambitious as HTC’s Sense UI, but we do appreciate that it integrates more services than HTC does.  When it comes down to it MOTOBLUR isn’t so much an overhaul of the Android interface like Sense is, but rather a tweaking.  It boils down to better contact integration (something we’re seeing in Android 2.0 anyway) and some decent custom widgets.  There are also five homescreen pages, instead of the stock three.  With the constant barrage of information the interface is very “in your face,” something we think will be very polarizing.  Keep in mind that you don’t have to use the widgets, however, and we really did the contact integration.



Organizer and Messaging:

All of the organizer options are stock Android.  The calendar integrates with your Gmail account and syncs wirelessly.  There is no memo or tasks program, but several are available in the Android Market, the most notable being Remember the Milk.  The alarm clock has been ever so slightly tweaked to allow the user to change the snooze time.


As mentioned before messaging is not only SMS and MMS, but also integrates messages from the various social network services, as well as other user-defined personal and corporate email accounts.  In addition to the physical QWERTY the on-screen Android keyboard is available as well.

Multimedia and Camera:

The Motorola CLIQ utilizes Android’s native music player.  There is nothing inherently wrong with it, but it could use some more polish.  Still, it handled all of the mp3s we threw at it just fine, properly displaying album art and track info.  Music can be downloaded OTA via the Amazon MP3 store.

Motorola has reworked the picture gallery and video player so they are now prettier to look at.  When flipping through pictures, for example, the transition is much like turning a page.  The photo viewer allows for picture editing as well.  Users can adjust a number of variables, such as RGB, brightness, contrast, color saturation and others, and an auto-fix noticeably touches up images.  There is a very cool preview feature where half the picture stays as the original and the other half is adjusted so you can compare the differences.  The image can be cropped and rotated, or have the resolution cut down.  The user can select from different color effects or add speech bubbles, clip art and frame the picture.  All-in-all, it offers some very handy stuff.



Videos taken with the CLIQ can be cropped, but that is the extent of the editing capabilities.  The MPEG-4 videos we use as test files were not able to be edited.  Videos looked great on the display, and while native codec support is weak there are apps for that (or at least ones that are coming soon.)

The camera interface is pretty simple, but one nice feature is that when you take a picture it displays your location information and integrates that into the filename.  Settings are fairly sparse; the user can adjust resolution, geotagging preferences, color effect, toggle auto focus and choose from automatic or preset white balances.  Images turned out quite well however, with good color saturation and above average detail.  The color representation was often made better by the auto-correction via the photo editing software, and we were quite pleased with the CLIQ’s performance.




Connectivity and Software:

The Motorola CLIQ is a quad-band GSM phone with tri-band 7.2MB/s 3G on the 900, 1700 and 2100MHz frequencies.  T-Mobile’s 3G coverage is pretty small right now, but thankfully Wi-Fi is included as well for high-speed data.  When connected via Edge it took a few minutes for us to load phonearena.com, but as you would expect it loaded noticeably quicker on Wi-Fi.  The stock Android browser is good but not great.  As usual multi-touch is not implemented, a feature that would influence our opinion on it heavily.



The CLIQ features 256MB RAM, 512MB ROM and a Qualcomm MSM7201A processor at 528 MHz, which is pretty standard for Android devices.  It was no slower or faster than recent smartphones we have tested; there were times we found ourselves waiting longer than we would have wanted but in general it was snappy enough.  There is not much in terms of preloaded software beyond the already-covered Motorola enhancements, but with the Android Market now over the 10,000 app mark there are plenty of items for the user to explore and download.

Performance and Conclusion:

When we held the Motorola CLIQ in the traditional position callers were very pleased with the sound quality, rating us at an 8.5, but just a slight movement, such as pinning the phone between our ear and shoulder with no hands, and quality significantly dropped.  To us callers sounded very good, and we would agree with their 8.5 rating.  Sound quality was clear, voice reproduction was good and the volume was loud enough, but in a noisy environment we would have preferred more.  The battery is rated for 6 hours of talk time, which should be plenty to get most users though the day.  Standby time was great, and after many days of non-use (but updates via MOTOBLUR) the battery was still well over half full.

The Motorola CLIQ offers some very nice features, and we like the theory behind MOTOBLUR even if the execution still has some refining to undergo.  Our biggest complaint is the concave keyboard keys and the overall chintzy feel of the phone, but these are offset with a very good display, camera and social networking integration of MOTOBLUR.  What it comes down to in the end is price: at $200 on contract the CLIQ is the most expensive Android device on the market along with the DROID, but offers none of the premium features that the DROID does.  Given recent entries into the market like the DROID Eris and the Hero, T-Mobile’s entire Android lineup could use a price slashing, and at under $100 the CLIQ would be a much more compelling offering.

Motorola CLIQ Video Review: