NEWS
On Thursday morning, Motorola officially introduced its first Google Android device: the Motorola Cliq. The announcement was made by Motorola's co-CEO Sanjay Jha at the Mobilize 09 conference in San Francisco, who was later joined by Cole Brodman, T-Mobile's chief technology and information officer, to show off the Cliq.
Long-rumoured as the Morrison, the Motorola Cliq will be available from T-Mobile later this year, just in time for Christmas, but pricing was not revealed during its introduction. T-Mobile will offer the phone in two colours: titanium or winter white, and it will be sold worldwide in 2010 as the Motorola Dext. Motorola did say it would announce a second Android phone in the coming weeks.
The Cliq measures 4.49 inches tall by 2.28 inches wide by 0.62 inch thick and weighs 5.6 ounces. It features a 3.1-inch HVGA touchscreen with a 320 x 480 pixel resolution and has a slide-out Qwerty keyboard as well as a soft keyboard. It's also equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Motorola unveiled its first Android device, The Cliq, on Thursday (photo credit: Josh Miller/CNET)
The phone will run Android 1.5 Cupcake and offer access to Google's various services, including Google Maps with Street View, Google Voice Search, Picasa, and GTalk. The smartphone supports a number email clients, such as Yahoo!, Windows Live, and other POP3 and IMAP services, and syncs with Microsoft Exchange, including calendar. The QuickOffice Suite is also onboard for document viewing.
The quad-band Cliq is 3G-capable and offers a full HTML Google browser, wi-fi, Bluetooth and GPS. Multimedia features come in the form of a five-megapixel camera with video recording capabilities and a built-in music and video player. The smartphone also comes preloaded with the Amazon MP3 Store, a dedicated YouTube app, Shazam, Last.fm, and Imeem. Rated talk time is 6 hours and up to 13.5 days of standby time.
Motorola is hoping its MotoBlur user interface will help differentiate it from the rest of the smartphone pack. As discussed in the keynote, MotoBlur syncs information from different sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and personal and work email accounts, and automatically streams updates to the homescreen. The idea behind it is that this constant stream of information will mean you have to spend less time opening and closing applications.
MotoBlur is certainly nice in that it brings together all a user's information, much like Palm's Synergy feature, but it'll be interesting to see the real-life user experience of it.
