Motorola Resurrects Itself With CLIQ Android Phone
Motorola has seen it marketshare) drop precipitously since the heydays of the RAZR. A large part of this has to do with the increasing consumer demand for smart phones that do much more than make calls and send texts. To gain a piece of the ever growing consumer smart phone market, they’re looking to Google’s Android, with the announcement of the new Motorola CLIQ.
Right off the top, I think it’s safe to say that CLIQ is probably pronounced ‘clique’ (not ‘click’) since the new MOTOBLUR interface they’ve built on top of Android appears to be a sea of social networking widgets and bubbles. Unless, of course, you’re one of those people who thinks the two words are pronounced the same. You’re NOT one of those people, are you?
In the GUI department, the CLIQ has certainly taken a page out of the Palm webOS playbook, by creating an integrated contacts framework that allows you to see status updates of friends across different social networking applications. You know the drill here – SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc. The GUI looks interesting, though maybe a little TOO social networking oriented for my tastes. If you want to get a better feel of the CLIQ and it’s BLUR interface, check out the online ‘simulator’.
As for the hardware specs, it seems pretty impressive, with a landscape sliding qwerty keyboard, and all the bells and whistles (5MP camera, GPS, compass, WiFi, 3G etc) one would expect from a consumer touch screen phone. They’ve also given it a pretty decent 1420mAh, which from past experiences should help in the battery life department, as previous Android devices with smaller 1150mAh barely scrape through a day. Oddly, the ‘tech specs’ page doesn’t mention what kind of processor is under the hood, which is a glaring omission.
The phone will hit Verizon in time for the holidays, while the rest of the world will have to wait until early 2010.
UPDATE: According to this engadget post, the CLIQ is using a Qualcomm MSM7201a processor, which is the same 528MHz processor found in HTC Android devices and many other smart phones.
