PhoneScoop: MOTOROLA CLIQ

[0]Hey everybody, phonescoop here. Today we are talking a slightly more in depth look at the new MOTOROLA CLIQ, soon to be available for sale via TMobile. We looked at the CLIQ several weeks ago when it was first announced by Motorola, but now we have had some time to spend with it and have a lot more impressions based on daily use. Lets take a quick tour around the hardware before we dig into the software. We have got a generous screen on the front and just three buttons here. We have got a menu key, home key and back key. You will notice there is no send and end keys on the MOTOROLA CLIQ as there are with most other Android based handsets on the left side of the phone we have got a sliding lock key here and the volume toggle here. The volume toggle little bit hard to find and then we have got a microUSB port here along the bottom corner of the phone there. Nothing along the very bottom. And on the right you can see we [1]have got two different buttons. One is a two stage camera key and the other is a dedicated power and locking key. Nothing in particular along the back and on the top we have a full 3.5mm headset jack. Now one thing I am going to show you, take off the back cover there we have got the SIM card slot, big old battery and here is the microSD card slot. We have also got this really weird little hatch thingy that you have to pull back in order to retrieve the card, so they dont make it easy, card is locked in there good and tight. So you know its not going to go anywhere. And also, atleast you could hot swap though. You cannot take the card out while the phone is running. And thats the hardward, and of course we shouldnt forget the full QWERTY keyboard. I will be honest with you folks, I was not the biggest fan of this keyboard. Very mushy, in particular, the [2]T key has no travel and feedback at all and that could be because I have a preproduction unit here but you know it keyboard was not the strong point. I felt the keys themselves were not the easiest to find and travel and feedback wasnt all that great. D pad here however does work good. One thing to notice. You will see lots of ply with the top half of the phone when I shake it around It wasnt put together exactly you know super duper strong The MOTOROLA CLIQ of course runs MOTOROLA's new MOTOBLUR service which you can see here on the main screen. Basically what MOTOBLUR does is stream all your Facebook and Twitter updates on to the home screen so you can see we have a weather widget. This message box here is for messages that are directed specifically at you. So any DMs you get from Twitter [3]any emails you get from Facebook, or status updates on your page as well as text and SMS messages are going to go in this area here you can dive down and read them individually. The very top are updates that you put up.So if I update my Twitter status or Facebook feed that where it goes right there. And you can see that we can easily post something to all the services or to either Facebook or Twitter depending on how feel And this of course is your Facebook and Twitter stream and I am not going to dive into that only because I dont want to reveal the identity of all the people that I follow and who follow me and converse with me but basically you tap this, it opens and you can swipe sideways to see all the different pages of things people post. So this is going to be the only one we look at. And this is basically how it appears. You will see that all the happenings that show up here on your stream will look [4]exactly like this. And you can swipe sideways through them to look at them more in depth. Other things that are on the home screen of the MOTOROLA CLIQ are news feed which you can see here, looks very similar to happenings and again you can zoom through it sideways. And of course entertainment, we can dive into entertainment and look at all sorts of different headlines here and whats really interesting of course is that this is fully customizable. So we will hit set up, go in here and you can have all sorts of different crazy feeds that you can put into your own channel. So we will choose a channel, we will go to the best in blogs, we will go to technology blogs because hey, thats why you are here right and you can see all the different blogs that are listed here that we can choose from. So we will go to the top 10 google android blogs and you can see it has a whole list of different android blogs there. We can choose any of these and have their information fed into our home screen feed. So [5]you could spend hours and hours and hours doing this. Its a little bit fun, but it also takes time, and you can see how far down we dug before we get back out to the main screen its pretty far. Of course we also have other areas in the home screen to drop in content that we like. Also included out of the box we got some tips and tricks in getting started. These are things that you can ditch and get rid of after you have used it for a little while. Basically just offer you ways on how to use the device more effectively. Of course we have the main Android menu here not changed from other Android phones. Course we want to go to the phone dialer we just tap here we have the basic dialer, using this key we can jump into our contacts, we can use voice commands or we can choose this to go into search mode, search through our contacts. You can also look at recent calls, frequent calls and set up your own speed dial and call quality is OK, and interacting with the phone itself is not [6]bad. So those are the basics. We could spend all day diving into MOTOBLUR and how it works, but you have seen a pretty nice overview here. Of course, you know, the MOTOBLUR comes with a number of other features such as the camera, video recorder, gallery application, instant messaging, music application you name it, its pretty much all there. Nice that its preloaded with TeleNav Office, you have got the voice search, voice dialing, YouTube application and social networking all built right in. And of course Google services such as GMail Google Maps, Google Talk and so on. Here is the other happenings client you can access it from the home page or you can look at like this. And this is where it will basically feed or stream all your Facebook and Twitter updates into long, long continuous stream of posts. So you never have to actually check a separate Facebook [7]or Twitter client. You can just use happenings directly and access all your information from here. So pretty interesting way to interact with all your social networks. That is the MOTOROLA CLIQ, a new Android phone from MOTOROLA running MOTOBLUR.


Channel: phonescoop