Motorola CLIQ - Straight up and Simple

While waiting to receive my CLIQ I was reading a lot of the initial reviews on the phone.  I was honestly a bit worried.  While it seemed like this would be an amazing phone for me considering the Social Networking aspect, a lot of the reviews put it down.  I’m going to go over the good and bad of the phone which is just a standard production model, the same as anyone would get it from t-mobile, heck I even got it the way everyone gets it.

I’m not going to go through an un-boxing of the product, search youtube for that, needless to say I liked the packaging.  A lot better than the standard t-mo boxes.

So I got my phone, and grabbed my old SIM and SD Card. The first thing I noticed when I opened the battery cover was locking tabs. This has been missed from most phones, they’re just little rubber strips that secure the Micro SD and the SIM card in place, so they can’t be knocked out from moving the phone around.  +1 cool idea there.  Also the battery is secure in place, virtually no wiggle room which was another good thing to see, when I had my original G1 it had the smaller battery and would leave room that I didn’t like.

After popping on the battery cover I flipped the phone over, it is solid, a very nice solid feel.  They physical keyboard after a good bit of use the past 48 hours is nice, I’m not sure where the other reviewers were having issues with the alt and space, I’ve had no such problems what-so-ever.  Nice feel, nice solid key presses.

I got the phone booted up, when through the Motoblur setup, which was easy and quick, started syncing and setting up everything for mobile use.  Motoblur is well documented out there so I’m not going to go over it, if for some reason your reading this and don’t know what it is, it’s an interconnect of all your major social networking needs.  Google It.

While the hardware is almost comparable to the G1, this unit is faster than a stock G1 on 1.5 android.  I’m not sure if this is just because of the newer hardware or what, but I was expecting the sluggishness I experienced running 1.5 on the G1.  While speaking of 1.5 that is the one disadvantage so far, there is no 1.6 update which I would really, really like due to the new market app which is amazing.  I’m hoping for the update, but it does not kill the phone if there is none.

The battery life so far hasn’t been an issue under normal use, I’m going to really try and stress test it next time I have off of work, but under normal usage conditions you should get a day’s worth as I do. Just remember to do full discharge cycle on your first usage.

The biggest problem I’ve noticed is the touchscreen is different than the G1 MT3G and Sprint Hero all together.  It seems to be more accurate to your initial point of impact when your touching.  So it’s not as forgiving as the other models. There is also no calibration for the touchscreen so your stuck with it.  But give it 12 hours as I did and you should be fairly good with it.


Overall - 8/10