Review: Motorola Cliq SmartphoneReview: Motorola Cliq Smartphone

The Cliq is the first in what promises to be an avalanche of Android handsets from Motorola over the next 12 months. Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha said the company plans to release 20 smartphones by the end of 2010, most of which will be running Android. Despite being its first, the Motorola Cliq is not the company's great comeback device. It comes close, and displays fits of brilliance, but ultimately falls just short of being a great smartphone.

For Motorola, being just "good" isn't good enough. The firm has a sad record of financial losses over the last three years and desperately needs to get back into the game with a winner. It has pinned its resurrection hopes on Android, the free mobile operating system developed by Google. In fact, Motorola publicly stated that it is not going to make any more Windows Mobile smartphones until Windows Mobile 7 arrives. It is skipping Windows Mobile 6.5 -- which just hit the market -- entirely.

Rather than just make a stock Android phone in the Cliq, Motorola took things a bit further by endowing it with Motoblur, its social networking service. Motoblur delivers an unending stream of status updates and posts from a user's Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter friends right to the desktop of the Cliq. This lets the user remain constantly in the know of all the goings-on in their friends' and family's lives. The theory is better than the reality.

Before we dive into Blur, let's look at the phone itself first.

Hardware

The Cliq is a sideways slider that has a full QWERTY keyboard hidden under the screen. It is a fairly sizable phone, as devices that use this form factor often are. The weight and feel of it in your hands is good and it's not so large as to be unusable. The buttons on the sides of the phone are very thin and small, making them somewhat hard to activate. There is the usual assortment of ports for headphones and charging/data transfer.

The Cliq has a large, four-row keyboard for typing messages. The keyboard is passable, but doesn't match those developed by companies such as Research In Motion. The keys have a nice contour and shape to them, but travel and feedback -- how it actually feels to push the buttons -- isn't satisfying at all. There is also a five-way directional pad to the left of the keyboard, but this type of feature is pretty redundant on a touch phone.

Speaking of touching, the Cliq has a 3.1-inch touch display that measures 320 x 480 pixels. That's exactly the same as the iPhone and many other devices. It does just fine, but the phones being released by Samsung and HTC are packing in way more pixels. The Cliq's display certainly works well; it simply doesn't stand out when compared to its better-equipped peers. The AMOLED screen on the new Samsung Moment, for example, is stunning, as is the 480 x 854 high-resolution display of the Motorola Droid.

What unimpressed me most about the Cliq was the build quality. The materials are plastic-y and feel cheap. Not only that, the top half of the phone is not firmly installed. This means there is some side-to-side play, which detracts from the fit and finish of the device.

The hardware isn't bad, but it doesn't live up to the quality I know Motorola is capable of.

Performance

Just how well does the Cliq get its job done? A very mixed bag, I am afraid.

Call quality was solid, which I expect from Motorola phones. Motorola is all about making good radios, and the Cliq is no different. Calls via T-Mobile's network are free of the noises that can plague cell phones. I had no problems hearing those who called me, but the ringer could have been a bit louder. If you're thinking of taking a conference call on the Cliq with the speakerphone, go for it. The speakerphone worked really well.

On the data side of the equation, Web-surfing speeds were wildly inconsistent. The review unit I had experienced great difficulty finding and connecting to T-Mobile's 3G network -- even in areas with superb T-Mobile coverage. Other testers in different parts of the country had these same results, so I fear there may be some issue related to the 3G radio or software that prevents it from connecting. Given that the Cliq is a smartphone, it simply requires a 3G connection. Falling back to T-Mobile's EDGE network just isn't good enough. The Cliq sometimes had great 3G connections and speedy browsing, but most of the time it was connecting via EDGE. This is disappointing. Last -- and probably most important -- is battery life. In my tests, I found the Cliq's battery life to be among the worst I've come across. The culprit is Motoblur (more on this in a second). From a full 100% charge, I was getting seven hours of battery life, nine hours, sometimes 12 hours, depending on how I used it. That's not so great. Any smartphone that can't make it until at least 5 PM is not going to do anyone any favors.

Motoblur

The heart of the Cliq is Motoblur. On the surface, it seems to be a very good idea. Essentially, Google and Motorola decided to take advantage of some of the APIs offered by Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to enable a real-time stream of information that flows into the device.

Blur drops three widgets -- called "Happenings," "Updates," and "Messaging" -- on the home screen. "Happenings" is a constant live stream of all your friends' Facebook and Twitter status updates. "Updates" are all of your Twitter and Facebook status updates. "Messaging" is a unified inbox that merges your SMS/MMS and instant messages with Facebook e-mail messages and Twitter direct messages. The two most useful aspects of Blur are the "Updates" and "Messaging" widgets.

"Updates" is what the end user takes advantage of to post to Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Perhaps what's most useful is that you can pick and choose which networks you want to share with. Open the app, type a message, use the pull-down menu to choose the social network, and off the update goes. Alternately, you can send the update to all of your networks at once to keep them all in sync. It's a simple client that does what it says it will do.

"Messaging" is really a messaging center for all incoming messages that are aimed directly at the end user. That includes regular messaging vehicles such as SMS, MMS, and IM, but also e-mails that are sent to a user's Facebook or MySpace account, or Direct Messages sent through Twitter. I must admit, it is really nice to have one place to find all of these messages, rather than bouncing around to different applications spread across the phone.

The root of many of the Cliq's problems is with "Happenings," which feeds all your Facebook and Twitter friends' status updates to your phone. The concept sounds great, right? The problem is, if you have hundreds of Facebook friends and follow more than several hundred people on Twitter, it becomes overwhelming. See, Blur is actually a service that is provided from a Motorola server. Users create a Blur account, which accesses the social networks and then pushes the updates in real time to the phone.

The major problem is that the phone is connecting constantly to the T-Mobile data network to send and receive this message stream. What does constant radio activity mean? Poor battery life. It also makes for a major distraction. With updates flowing in all the time, it's hard to put the phone down and pay attention to mundane things such as work, driving, or cooking dinner.

Twitter is mostly to blame for Blur's woes. I follow about 2,500 people on Twitter. I am sure you can imagine how many tweets per day are being sent to the Cliq. Of course, users can choose to leave Twitter out of Blur, which helps to clear up this problem. This is a shame though, because one of Blur's strengths is that it supplants dedicated Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter applications on the phone: You never need to use them if you substitute Blur instead.

Blur does have some serious positives, though, mostly to do with its integration with the Cliq's contact database.

Blur is able to merge contact data across social networks and an end user's Gmail, Google, or other contacts databases. So if you are friends with Jimmy Jones on Facebook, follow him on Twitter, and have his regular work and home e-mail addresses, Jimmy's information all conveniently winds up in the same place on the phone. This is nice. What's more interesting is that if Jimmy recently updated his Twitter account several times, you'll see his recent tweets on his contact page.

In fact, users can sort through their contacts based on who has updated their status most recently. How is this helpful or relevant? Perhaps a colleague of yours set his/her Facebook status as "Stuck in traffic." If that contact calls you, you'll know right away what his/her situation is, and you can answer by saying, "How's the traffic?" before he/she even tells you about it. I like this aspect of Blur a lot.

This is a really interesting approach to social networking, even if it misfires slightly. I fully expect Motorola to refine how Blur operates to optimize it for users with large numbers of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter friends. If they can figure out how to optimize battery life, too, that would be a really good thing.

Conclusion

In sum, the Cliq is a solid effort for Motorola's first Android phone, though it could have been more refined. The hardware issues are easy to fix, as are some of the problems inherent in Motoblur. The fact that Motorola conceived Motoblur at all demonstrates that the company understands how and why people are using smarter devices to keep track of their social networks. This alone gives me hope that more good things are to come from Motorola.

For Further Reading

Android 2.0 Revs Enterprise Features

Sony Ericsson's Xperia X10 Android Phone A Winner

Motorola Posts 3Q Profit