Rating:

It’s a genuine Motorola product, and I expected more. Or am I expecting too much if I want a phone charger to actually charge?

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The customizable home screen is great. I can rearrange, add or delete icons on the screen to my preference. The ability to use music from my file as ringtone is another plus. I found some Android applications to be very useful. Hopefully as time goes by, there will be more applications. The phone comes with many applications such as Google Map, GPS, AccuWeather, Amazon Music Store and Shazam. The Motoblur is something I don’t use much of. If you are into the social networking sites, this is something for you.

The main drawback to the phone is the battery life. With Motoblur (Facebook, MySpace), gps, emails, widgets; the battery life is extremely short. I ended up shut off most networking applicatons to avoid charging my phone daily. Other minus is professional applications for Android is far behind Microsoft Mobile, iPhone, Palm OS and Blackberry. Again hopefully in time that will change.

I have not experience any lags nor freezing of the phone as I had with Motorola ZN5 and E8. I have experienced the phone not hanging up calls, after I pressed the end call botton. The touchscreen is a bit too sensitive for me. But it is on par with the iPod Touch; in some ways it is better than the Touch.

Pros:

-Slide out QWERTY keyboard

-Large HVGA screen

-Ability to personalize home screen and ringtone

-Google Map and GPS

-5mp camera

-Full web browser

-Wi-Fi and 3G

-Call quality with T-Mobile

Cons:

-Battery life (major drawback)

-No Android v2.0

-No flash for camera

I am glad I got this phone. It has met and/or exceeded my expectations after reading the tech sites these past few months.

I think Motorola came out with a very nice smartphone.

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Some of the phone features are very nice – going to the contacts app you can see ‘history’ of your contacts, which includes emails from them. However, phone dialer using the contact/address book is not convenient – if you have a large contact database (I have hundreds of contacts), you have to scroll thru them or slide out the keyboard to do a search. Without sliding out the keyboard, there’s no quick access to contacts such as typing in the first few letters of their name (Blackberry wins here).

Then the bad news came…bad battery life means turning off most apps and 3G, running the phone on the slower EDGE network. In fact, the phone had a hard time getting thru 18 holes of golf (tried to use the golf gps app). Turning all this stuff off means losing a lot of the ‘fun’ factor of the phone, and not having the advantage of the faster 3G. Still, with a lot of widgets turned off and running in 2G mode, I was able to get about 1-1/2 day use before needing to recharge the phone.

Other cons: GPS lock was real slow, and for gaming the touch screen was not always responsive or accurate.

The real deal killer was Tmobile. My last month’s bill (using the Blackberry) had a wrong charge of $300 for international roaming – this was for using data for “days” in a country where I was in transit for 3 hours. After spending 40 minutes on the phone with a service representative, they reversed the charges but “warned” that the Cliq should NOT be used for international travel because it continuously tries to communicate with the Google server and WILL run up roaming charges. The combination of bad billing from Tmobile and a phone that uses the internet too much really made it impractical to use the Cliq.

Since then I’ve gone back to the Blackberry, but still trying to get Tmobile to put my previous data plan (the Blackberry data plan and the Android data plan are different plans with Tmobile) in place so that my emails will come back on. What a big hassle to go thru all for nothing.

Maybe the Cliq with a better carrier with better plan options would have worked. Until then, it’s being returned before the remorse period is up.

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I enjoy the Market feature, where I have downloaded several applications, such as, pandora (a radio), a calendar, a reminder feature, a few games (hang man, tic tac toe, pegs), a dictionary, the Bible (finds the exact passage in church very quickly) and a spell checker to name a few. There are thousands of free downloads available.

There are five home screens, I can email, text and browse the Internet all while talking on the phone. Google maps is installed, so it’s like having my own personal GPS. Now I never get lost. Google maps automatically finds your exact location if you are lost. You can zoom in and out of the google maps. This feature works well with “Places” to find everything that is located near you (hospitals, hotels, shopping, food, etc). The camera is 5 mega pixels, and there is a video recording feature as well.

The only negative about this phone is the battery life. It’s very short, since several applications are running at once. You can extend the battery life by only having your phone check for updates every hour vs. every 5 minutes, reducing light on the screen, turning off the GPS and wifi features.