Motorola unveils its first Android phone

Bonnie Cha | Sep 11, 2009

Motorola Cliq
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

On Thursday, 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 here in San Francisco, who was later joined by Cole Brodman, T-Mobile's chief technology and information officer, to show off the Cliq.

Long-rumored as the Morrison, the Motorola Cliq will be available from T-Mobile later this fall, just in time for the holidays, but pricing was not revealed during its introduction. T-Mobile will offer the phone in two colors: Titanium or winter white, and it will be sold worldwide in 2010 as the Motorola Dext. Unfortunately, Motorola did not unveil the Sholes but did say that it would announce a second Android phone in the coming weeks.

The Cliq measures 114 x 58 x 15.6mm and weighs 163g. It features a 3.1-inch HVGA touch screen 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 3.5 millimeter headphone jack.

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 of 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 5-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 325 hours of standby time.

Obviously, it's a pretty full-featured phone, but it's not any different from a lot of smartphones today, which is why Motorola hopes its MotoBlur user interface will help differentiate it from the rest of the pack. As discussed in the keynote, MotoBlur syncs information from different sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and your personal and work email accounts, and automatically streams updates to your home screen. 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 your information, much like Palm's Synergy feature, but it'll be interesting to see the real-life user experience of it. Will it be really useful to have all that data on your home screen or will it just be a jumbled mess? Also, while the specs are good enough, they're not exactly mind-blowing either. Please chime in and tell us what you think of the device.

Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News and CNET Reviews.

Via CNET News

Filed under: Mobile Phones
Leave a comment | Bookmark | Share