Motorola Cliq Review and First Impressions

Update 11/29/2010

While my Cliq has served me for a year, I will resist buying another Motorola device.  Moto has been promising support for new releases of Android and has miserably failed.  I don’t trust Moto to take care of customers.  The Cliq is badly outdated, painfully slow in comparison to the latest devices available, and overall a disappointment.

I am on the hunt for a new device.  My hope is that Samsung will release a beautiful Android 2.2 device to run on the new Verison 4G LTE network…

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Okay, not sure who will read this but here goes at a micro review of the Motorola Cliq.  I’ve had the phone for about 90 minutes.

I have been an iPhone user for almost two years.  I am leaving the iPhone because despite promise after promise, AT&T cannot deliver a quality network.  I drop calls on the major highway running through Seattle all the time.  There is no excuse for this.  And I don’t received calls at my home despite their detailed coverage map indicating that my house is in an area with the best possible coverage.  My wife and kids have experienced excellent T-Mobile coverage at our house.  So for the next 14 days I will be putting the Cliq through it’s paces.

I need a reliable phone experience, full Exchange (business email, contacts, calendar) synchronization, a few apps (amazon, flixster, facebook, maps, weather, stocks, alarm clock, ebay, and…), a music player, a way to view pdf and office documents, and maybe a remote control for my computer (keynote presentations).  Over the next two weeks I will try and make this all happen.

So far I am pleased with call quality.  I am making and receiving calls from my home.  The phone synched perfectly with the bluetooth in my 2010 Subaru Outback, and is currently synchronizing all my Exchange information via the corporate sync application.  I am reading emails, seeing my contacts, and looking at my calendar.

Speaking of the Corporate Sync application.  So far so good.  My company uses Sherweb as our Exchange host.  For my domain/username I only entered my email address.  And for the server name I entered our OWA server name.

About the device itself.  It feels GREAT in my hand.  When the keyboard is out the top row of keys is a little too close to the screen portion of the device.  I have recognized that I have become a very sloppy typer on my iPhone since it corrects so well.  The on-screen keyboard on the Cliq appears to correct typos amazing well as well.

By the way, I find the look and feel of the Cliq experience to be superior to the iPhone so far.  The screen is bright and beautiful and the mechanics of the interface have been completely intuitive.

I’ll probably write more later so come back for more.

- Tom

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