Motorola Cliq review – Android phone with enhanced features

For:

Motorola Cliq has slider design with brilliant display and offers easy-to-use keyboard and controls. Motorola Cliq has various tweaks and improvements in user-interface as compared to its predecessor.

Against:

Motorola Cliq does not have camera flash, self-portrait mirror and some organizer features like file manager. You can only store applications on integrated memory. The microSD card slot is located behind the cover. The call quality was not excellent.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Motorola Cliq is based on WCDMA (UMTS)/GSM technology and supports quad-band of WCDMA (UMTS)/GSM 850/900/1800/1900. The Cliq is powered with 528 MHz processor and Google Android 1.5 operating system. The supported wireless interfaces are Bluetooth 2.0 EDR and IEEE 802.11b/g. The phone is capable of conference calling.

3.1-inch LCD display has a resolution of 320×480 pixels. It has the features of ambient light sensor and accelerometer to rotate the display. Motorola Cliq has 5-megapixels camera with automatic focus adjustment and geo-tagging.

The advanced features are Class 12 GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), Class 12 EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution), GPS, A-GPS, HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), embedded Java applications, inbuilt T-Mobile Web2Go Browser and support for POP3/IMAP4/SMTP email protocols.

The supported video playback formats are WMV H.263 video and AMR Audio, MPEG4, and H.264. Motorola Cliq also supports digital audio formats including AAC, AAC+, MIDI, WMA, WAV, MP3 and AMR.

Motorola Cliq has one connector: 1×3.5mm headset jack mini-phone and expansion slot for micro-SD card. 1420mAH lithium ion battery has a life of 325 hours idle standby time and 360 minutes of talk time. The accessories included inside the package are reference material, stereo headset, 2GB micro-SD card, USB cable and AC adapter.

Razzle Dazzle:

Motorola Cliq is 4.49 inches tall, 2.28 inches wide, 0.61 inch thick and weighs around 5.7 ounces. The Cliq has a slider design and comes in two colors: titanium and winter white. Our test model of Cliq had Titanium silver color. The moving parts and construction are sturdy and battery cover is textured. The Cliq gives a solid feel while taking in hand.

Inside Dope:

Google Android is a good mobile operating system and gaining success in the market. Now, Motorola has launched new handset Motorola Cliq MB200 for T-Mobile with Google Android operating system. The Cliq smartphone is a powerful device with action-packed features, spacious keyboard and easy-to-use design. Motorola has added a new MotoBlur user-interface to the Cliq, which synchronizes all e-mails and social-media contacts to one unique place. With some good features, Google Android OS has also some limitations. Motorola Cliq costs $199 with service contract from T-Mobile. The smartphone has broadened the hardware horizons available to the Android Mobile OS. It has comfortable keyboard layout and improved slider mechanism as compared to the 3G1. The Cliq is the first Android’s device to use full QWERTY keyboard since MyTouch 3G1. It will give tough competition to T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, 3G1 and Sprint’s HTC Hero. Let us take you to the feature set and drawbacks of Motorola Cliq.

Display

Motorola Cliq has 3.1-inch wide LCD display of 480×320 pixels resolution that supports 262,000 colors. The rich-color makes the phone easy on eyes. The LCD display has five home screens. On the home screen, you can add news feeds of several categories, widget to show phone tip, shortcuts from main menu, weather application and folders. Moreover, there is a shortcut to music player and Google Search bar on the home screen. The primary home screen shows a notification of unread emails and messages. The “happenings” newly added feature from Motorola is also available on home screen. The Cliq has an accelerometer for display orientation when you open the slider for keyboard and when you rotate the phone. The touch-screen interface is quick and responsive unlike MyTouch 3G.

During test, we observed some delay white changing the display orientation through the accelerometer. We would prefer a 3.25-inch wide touch-screen. There was no system crash, but it was sluggish while shifting between menus and opening applications.

Design

The pull-tab for main menu button is located beneath the display. You get a shortcut to contacts list, Talk control to access dialer, speed dial, list of recent calls and list of frequent calls. The dialer has square buttons and you will get shortcuts to voice dialer and contacts. On call, you can activate the speaker; mute the sound and access dial-pad easier than on MyTouch 3G/3G1. These small improvements makes a big difference overall.

Volume rocker, handy ring-silencer switch and micro-USB port are located on the left spine of Motorola Cliq. You can use this micro-USB port to charge the phone also. 3.5mm headset jack is on the top end, like that on HTC Hero. The power control/handset lock key and camera shutter sits on left spine. You can press the power control/handset lock key to show a menu for Bluetooth, GPS, airplane mode and Wi-Fi. The camera lens is located on the back. The micro-SD card slot is behind the battery cover. It is quite annoying that you have to open the battery cover to insert microSD card.

Navigation Array and Keyboard

Home button, back control and menu control are located beneath the display. You can activate the display by pressing the menu button and open shortcuts for opening Google search and notifications, accessing the Settings Menu, changing the wallpaper, and adding folders and widgets. The controls are flat in shape. There is a virtual onscreen control to end the call instead of a physical button.

Motorola Cliq has most ergonomic and roomiest physical keyboard, which we have ever seen on a smartphone. For better typing experience, the backlit keys are large and raised. We typed long messages and dialed the phone numbers without any mistake. There are four rows in the keyboard. The numbers shares the first row with alphabets and other two rows have alphabets with symbols. The controls including ALT button to access symbols, search button, space bar, shortcut for onscreen keyboard, back and return keys are located in bottom row. A toggle button with central OK key is located on the left side of keyboard. Motorola Cliq also has standard touch-screen Android keyboard.

Phonebook and PIM features

Motorola Cliq can store the contacts as per available memory and SIM cards can hold additional 250 contacts. Each contact entry can store eight-phone numbers, postal address, company name, notes, birthday and anniversary date, IM handle and four email addresses. You can divide the callers in groups and assign one of 55 polyphonic ring-tones and a photo.

The basic feature set of Motorola Cliq includes vibrate mode, multimedia and text messaging, calculator, and alarm clock. Like MyTouch 3G, the organizational features such as to-do list, file manager, notepad and world-clock are missing. Beyond these basics, the advanced features are speaker-independent voice dialing, PC Sync, stereo Bluetooth, visual voice mail, instant messing, Google Talk, Google voice search, USB mass storage and IEEE 802.11b standard Wi-Fi. Motorola Cliq also has integrated weather and news applications and feeds from Imeem and Shazam Mobile.

Camera

Motorola Cliq has a 5-megapixel camera that captures photos in three different resolutions. The features of camera includes three image quality choices, five white-balance settings, digital zoom, an auto-focus and seven color effects. The Cliq also has a handy-meter to show total number of photos to shoot. It has one touch access to slideshow and photo-gallery. The Cliq’s camcorder has various editing options with two quality choices: High – to store on SD card and Low – for MMS. Motorola Cliq does not have flash and self-portrait mirror that is a negative point for 5-megapixel camera. The shutter delay is still large like in MyTouch 3G. After editing, you can save videos and photos to phone, compose an audio postcard, upload them to online sharing websites and forward them to friends.

We had captured some photos and videos through Motorola Cliq. The photo quality was good and colors were natural with little image noise. However, images had little yellow tinge and some shots were blurry. The captured video quality was good, but the movements were blurry and there was audible background hum.

Media Player

Motorola Cliq has a built-in media player with features of airplane mode, shuffle and repeat mode, play-lists and album art. You can view the album art in list format and set any song instantly as ring-tone. You can transfer the music via microSD card, USB cable and Bluetooth. You can purchase and download songs from Amazon MP3 store. The Cliq has a YouTube application through which you can download video content from YouTube. We would prefer that Google would include an application like iTunes for watching rental/purchased movies online.

MotoBlur

MotoBlur merges phonebook contacts; email accounts address book (Yahoo, Gmail and corporate) and contacts from social networking website (Last.fm, Photobucket, Twitter, MySpace, Picasa and Facebook) to one master list. In this master list, you can link and unlink the contacts to each other. This feature is same as that of Palm Pre Synergy. As soon as you start the phone first time, MotoBlur will ask to register various email account and social-media profiles. After the setup, it will create the master list of all contacts. Motorola Cliq requires any email account for this setup, unlike other unlike other Android phones that needs only Gmail account. Moreover, MotoBlur will pull in pictures from profile for photo caller ID. To avoid the duplicate names, you have to make sure that names are listed identically in your various contacts lists.

In addition, the MotoBlur contacts master list will display the contacts’ status update on social networking websites. It also shows a “history” view to display the recent messages and emails. You can see a list of history for each contact and filter these contacts.  The contacts are not stored in phone’s internal memory, so you cannot backup them using T-Mobile Backup.

MotoBlur also adds a “Happenings” widget that shows latest photos, tweets, status updates and events from Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm. You can easily view and add comments and write on contact’s Facebook wall. The Social Status widget allows updating Twitter, MySpace and FaceBook from home screen. The Messages widget shows everything sent to you through MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, text and e-mail in “universal inbox”. However, it will only display unread messages/emails. If you want to read the message again, you have to access each account through main menu.

Browser

Motorola Cliq has T-Mobile Web2Go browser that offers instant access to sports scores, news headlines, weather reports, downloads, Facebook, Google, T-Mobile account and other content options. The default search is Yahoo, not Google.

The browsing experience of Motorola Cliq was responsive and intuitive. You can easily scroll through web pages and select links. The accelerometer switches the screen between portrait and landscape modes. There are virtual onscreen icons to zoom in and out without going through various menu-options. Motorola Cliq also offers to copy-and-paste, search on a page, open new browser window and separate tabs for history, frequent sites and bookmarks.

Email and Calendar

Motorola Cliq supports the POP3/SMTP protocols to configure the email accounts. It can also synchronize Outlook Web Access (OWA) (Exchange) accounts. The Cliq sorts the inbox folders by their name and syncs the account automatically as you open them. This feature was not available at MyTouch 3G. The Cliq also has integrated QuickOffice support to view/edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents.

Motorola Cliq also has improvements in synchronizing with Yahoo. Unlike MyTouch 3G, you cannot delete all the emails collectively in OWA accounts. The Cliq also offers to sync its calendar with Outlook Calendar. MotoBlur will combine all Outlook and Gmail events into master calendar. You can create new events for any calendar on the phone itself.

Personalization

You can adjust the backlight time, e-mail font size and brightness. Motorola Cliq has more security lock options as compared to previous Android phones. You can set security lock time and select to unlock the Cliq either with code or with pattern. You can also change the wallpaper and animations. Various ring-tones and options are available from T-Mobile via web browser.

GPS

For GPS and mapping, you will get integrated TeleNav application and Google Maps. The TeleNav application offers turn-by-turn driving directions, business search with more than 10 million listings, traffic alerts and one-click re-routing, restaurant reviews, gas prices and weather updates. TeleNav is free for first 14 days and after that, you have to purchase its subscription. Google Maps offers directions (not real-time), access to Google Latitude, street map view, satellite view and standard view. Motorola Cliq also has integrated compass.

Call Quality

We made some calls through quad-band based Motorola Cliq. The call quality was good, but has some issues. We had heard the caller’s voice with metallic effect. The sound volume was good with little static at our end. The callers also received ours sound with metallic effect and wind noise. We could understand the automated calling system.

The speakerphone call quality was good, but we had to stand closely to the phone. There was little distortion at highest volume levels. We played some music tracks to test the sound and found that the music quality was good. The headset had offered better listening experience over normal speakers.

Battery life

Motorola Cliq has an inbuilt lithium ion battery that has a life of 13.5 days of idle standby time and 6 hours of talk time.

Verdict:

Motorola Cliq has nice design, good feature set and various improvements in user-interface. This is a plus point for Google Android operating system and for Motorola handset also. MotoBlur is the newly added feature. The call quality was poor, but the Motorola Cliq still has lots of features which might make a convincing argument for a smartphone shopper.