MobileBurn : MOTOROLA CLIQ 2

[0]The CLIQ supports TMobile USA's visual voicemail system. I am going to pull up one of my messages Turn the speakerphone on so you can hear it and just going to hit play. (on phone): "Test of the visual voicemail system on MOTOROLA CLIQ for TMobile USA" And now that I am done listening to it I can either call the contact back or I can send them a text message or just delete message. Very simple to find and call a contact. Just start typing, it automatically goes through and narrows down your contact list to any possible matches. At which point you can send text messages or call the user. Let me just call this user right now. Turn on the speakerphone. Notice there is also a mute button. And of course you just have to tap to end the call. There are some of the icons across the top thats the notification area. We drag that down. You see there is new email messages. Notification brings that right up. Here is some tests that we sent ourselves earlier. Regular GMail client just like you see in other devices As with other Android devices, if you long press the Home key from anywhere you get your six most recently accessed applications. For example, you can go to Happenings and I can hold down again and access maybe the contacts. Pressing it briefly takes you back to the home screen and in the case of the CLIQ pressing it again from the home screen will bring up the main menu. You can of course bring up main menu by tapping or dragging this onscreen control as well. Give you an example how to access search functionality without the keyboard just long press the menu button. And brings up the onscreen keyboard and you can start typing. So I can further down and type I dont know lets see C, A, M [2]and we got camera and camcorder. MOTOROLA includes a few other Android widgets. You can see we have got tips and tricks, these are actually RSS feeds and you can see how they are used in a more normal sense over here on this pane. Messages come in. You know, new RSS messages from your favorite feeds. You can group them together and do all sorts of things with those. Fairly robust so you can see we have got the same type widget but two different categories, entertainment and regular news. The browser on the CLIQ does a nice job of rendering complex sites but it does not have the multitouch zooming capabilities that people are after. Instead you have to use this onscreen control which disappears after a second only appears when you move the page. So if you are a little off in your timing you could accidentally hit a link or something like that which can be pretty annoying. There is also a 1X button [3]for going back to the default zoom rate. See we are loading up another page right now and it also supports windows. So we have multiple windows open, we can tap over to this story about the recent Sidekick data failure and jump back to the mobileburn page Now there is no proper Flash support on this so you are not going to be able to watch YouTube videos from inside webpages like you can on the HTC Hero but the browser is still pretty good nonetheless. Here is a quick demonstration of Google's voice search. I will tap on the voice search icon here: McDonalds Its going to analyze what I said and then load it up in the browser It should also give us some local results based on the current location of the phone. I can hit get directions here, pull up in Google maps [4]and hopefully get directions from right where I am I am going to pull up the music application Show you how it works. Organizes everything by artist album, track name, that kind of stuff Get a track off of it and start playing it since the phone has a 3.5mm headphone jack it is really convenient to use any normal headphones just lying around the house Pull up the menu and see you can see what else is available. Party shuffle mode you can use this as a ring tone. Create new playlist, and of course go back to the library. I have got the camera loaded right now. So it works in both landscape and portrait modes. Easy to use. Just press the button halfway and get the green indicators for focus press it all the way to take the photo [5]Then the recently captured photo will show up on the bottom of my hand corner. Just tap on it We can see it go through some other photos as well. Another thing thats important is that MOTOBLUR integrates with both photo bucket and Picasa and you can therefore share your photos with those services or you know, MySpace, and other services as well. Its all really quite versatile Pull up the settings just so you can see it not a whole lot of settings. But it does have geotagging support and of course, white balance and autofocus controls as well. You can also activate the camcorder mode, start the camcorder by pressing the button. Now we are recording we will just move around a bit so you can tell its working. Stop it. And [6]access it and we will tap on play here. Now you can see the video. Go back and take a look at the camcorder settings. So on high quality right now and again some white balance and focusing options. We have been very pleased and in general with MOTOBLUR on the CLIQ but there are some UI issues that are not necessarily related to BLUR that have been bothering. For example, I am going to drag this along the clock icon off to the right here where the trash icon will show up so I can remove it. And you will notice that while doing that I will often be able to dump it and its gone. But I have moved to the next screen. Just kind of annoying. Its not a deal breaker. Also the screen's not as responsive as some. More often than not, when I am doing swipe some, opening up an application and [7]not more often than not, but too often I suppose is what you would say and that gets to be a little tiring. So MOTOBLUR contact management system also can be a little difficult to get a handle on with all the various linked contacts especially if you done like me and gone through and added contacts from multiple sources, removed them, readded them, sometimes the linked contacts get a little complicated. So a little bit messy, it needs to be cleaned up a bit. But in general, everything on the device works pretty well. I have been very very happy with it and I have really loved the keyboard. Its really a dynamite keyboard. And I am happy as a nice solid Android device. Still some work which could be done to it to improve it but I think Motorola has done a really fine job with the CLIQ so far. Another thing I really like about the device is the MOTOBLUR portal which allows you to not only locate your device within a 1000ft or something like that and tell you where [8]you lost it on an office or whether it is moving around town in a cab perhaps. Also allows you to do a remote wipe of the device which I have done, import contacts Its really a pretty usable system. Adds a lot of functionality that we havent seen on Android devices, so far. So overall I am very very pleased with the CLIQ It will be on sale for preorder starting on the 19th and available in general beginning next month for 199.99 with a two year contract. Not the cheapest price, but its a really solid device and I think people are really going to like it Once again, thats the MOTOROLA CLIQ for T-Mobile USA and I am Micheal Orell from MobileBurn.com


Channel: MobileBurn

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