MobileBurn: MOTOROLA CLIQ part 1

[0]This is Micheal Orell of MobileBurn.com and today I have with me the MOTOROLA CLIQ for TMobile USA, marketed as the DEXT in other parts of the world. It is a Android smartphone with a slideout QWERTY keyboard, capacitive half VGA display and a 5MP camera in addition to MOTOROLA's MOTOBLUR social networking support. Lets take a quick look at the hardware design. You can see horizontal slideout keyboard 4 full rows with a DPAD here, very good feel in the keys. This is one of my favorite keyboards, probably the favorite keyboard I have had in terms of this form factor. And I have used quite a few of them. Buttons for numbers, symbols shift button on both sides, dedicated back button which duplicates the functionality of this hardware button up here. And it is a hardware button, its not touch sensitive, it actually is a clicked to it. Same thing with the home and the menu keys. As I mentioned the keys have a really nice [1]feel to them. Works really well. Good solid click, this is the titanium finish device. There is also a white version. A volume control and a microUSB port for USB connectivity to a PC as well as charging. This little slider here throws the phone into silent and vibrate mode. You can say its just like a Palm Treo in that regard. When you can see the red its in silent mode and this is the normal mode. Both versions of the device have a textured backpanel. No flash or a supporter mirror for the camera. This is the power standby button here. Turns it to a device on and off. And this is a two stage camera shutter button. Up top is a 3.5mm headphone jack. Nothing much to see on the bottom. And the microphone is actually located at a tiny little indentation right there. [2]On the back of the device is the MOTOROLA logo when it is opened up and it actually glows which is pretty cool. Just to give you some scale, here is the MOTOROLA CLIQ next to HTC's Hero for Sprint. You can see the CLIQ is thicker but otherwise the two devices are about the same size and they both feature the same sized display. Same resolution as well. I have popped the rear cover off the device. So as you can see the battery with a little pull tab for removing it makes a lot easier. MicroSDHC card slot. 4 Gig card comes with the device. I have got a 16 Gig of my own in here which is loaded up with some of these and other things like that. And of course the SIM card slot. These The easiest way to activate the CLIQ is to press the menu button twice. First brings up the lock screen. Pressing again unlocks it. You see we have got a screen full of widgets here MOTOROLA and some third party. One of the nice things about this [3]system is when you throw into landscape mode everything adjusts accordingly. You can also use the DPad to move from home screen to home screen and just like on the HTC sense devices there is more than the standard 3 panel. So MOTOROLA has 5 panels. Now if you look at right here where my thumb is you will see a little visual indication of where you are with the red dot moving across 5 circles. You can of course see use finger swipes to move back and forth as well. One of the big things about MOTOBLUR is that it supports so many different accounts and links them all up. For example if I hit the messaging icon here, you can see a number of different inboxes. I have got personal IMAP mail, I have got exchange mail, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, the text messaging inbox and the universal inbox which shows messages from all of those. The only thing its [4]missing in here is the GMail client. GMail is done directly through a GMail client although truth be bold, my Exchange account also happens to be a separate GMail account. So you can do GMail through the universal inbox by using it via Exchange. Right now I am in the universal inbox. You can see there is two direct messages from Twitter, little Twitter icon down here exchange message, and a personal email message going to the Exchange message you can see the message here. You can also read HTML versions Right now we are on a WiFi connection but the device supports EDGE and 3G data on TMobile's network. With the HTML version, you can see we have bolder text, colors and things like that. [5]If you want to create a new message, just tap on the plus sign here choose the account you want to create it with and say exchange and we can go here and start typing a message and double space for period. Subject and now lets go back up to To box. But before I do that, I am going to back out here Now you will notice that there is a little one next to the plus sign meaning there is already one new message and progress and so I can create yet another one or I can continue this one go back here and now lets select a contact you can filter your contacts based on account type. You can of course flip through all of them. If you have a lot of contacts like I do, sometimes easier to just pick the account. Pick the exchange account. I have only have one in here to make it [6]easier to find. And I am going to check that email address and there it is. Now I have To Subject and Message body all finished. Now I can just send off the message. The Happenings application works somewhat the same way Its a central Inbox for all your different social networking functions. You can look through old Twitter messages or anything like that You can also set your status on multiple different accounts at one time. I am going to say all services This is a status update. And now MySpace, Twitter and Facebook will all get the same status update at one time [7]Hit the home button to go back and we will slide over to the next panel. You can see right here this is. my status update. And this shows the last one I did. So its also an easy way to get back to this and add your own status update again. This is part of the messaging system. You can see I have the new direct message from Twitter, I can read it right here on the screen. Theres two of them Reply to them or remove them. No recent tweets coming in or anything like that. These are just set up with the test accounts so there is not much going on. You can access the contacts with this blue tab on the home screen Really normal looking contact application lets skip ahead by letter, and of course as I showed you before, you can filter by contact source. All our GMail contacts and if we switch over to history here, you will see all [8]the calls and messages from just those contacts. Lets go back here and go to All contacts again and we move over to status to see all the status updates from all of our contacts Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and all those things are in there You can filter by, say, Favorites or just say Twitter, in this case You can see my last personal update. That last Twitter update also shows up in the happenings widget on the screen. If we go to the home screen, hit the happenings button here. Again you can see there is the Twitter update, you can tap on it to the full things. Favorite it. And even send a reply. One of the things that the MOTOBLUR system does is links up contacts [9]I have a test contact right here. It has the MobileBurn test Twitter account linked to it and of course this is just the regular Google contact. So you can see the two things are mashed up. I can show you in specific, when I go Unlink contact and you can see the various contacts that are linked up here. Now some of them are like the MOTOBLUR address and thats part of keeping everything synced up in case you lose your device You can, then, unlink contacts or manually link them. Sometimes, the names dont quite match up or email addresses are different. You have to do them manually.


Channel: MobileBurn