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The plastic back has an interesting pattern that improves grip just a little and the metallic surround saves the phone from looking cheap. In fact, in true Moto fashion, it's built like a little tank and it feels very sturdy and weighty. The microSD card slot lives under the back door and you need not remove the battery to access the card. The card slot is uniquely designed and is a little fiddly.

The keyboard is large and the keys have good tactile feedback and doming. We're not sure the d-pad is all that necessary and we're surprised it's on the left side (I'm a lefty and won't complain but how about you righties?). The number row is embedded in the top row of letters and requires a press of the Alt key, but that does make room for a large spacebar below the letter rows along with search, back and symbol keys. The keyboard is decent-- a good thing for a social networking and messaging oriented phone.


The phone runs Android OS 1.5 which seems a little old since the MyTouch 3G got the 1.6 update a while ago and Motorola's Droid runs 2.0 (we're still not sure how Moto got a 2.0 phone out a week after that OS was released to developers!). Since the Cliq is heavily customized, it's by no means a vanilla Google phone and that means Moto rather than Google will have to come up with future OS updates, if there are any. We assume that Moto has been working on MOTOBLUR for quite some time, hence the older OS. MOTOBLUR supports 8 social networking and messaging services: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google, LastFM, Picasa, Photobucket, Yahoo mail, standard email and corporate (Exchange) sync. Android's settings menu has an entry called accounts and you can add and remove these services here. Motorola handles the aggregation and push for most of these services. That means that you'll need to create a MOTOBLUR account first, and then each service you sign up for is stored in your MOTOBLUR account which you can manage from the phone or from a computer via web browser. The back end web services show a serious commitment and we assume Moto intends to release more MOTOBLUR phones that will take advantage of these services. Motorola provides the unified source to reduce battery load (polling 4 or more services would indeed be taxing). That said, the Cliq doesn't have awesome battery life, so we can only image what it would be like without the Moto service. Though we're not fans of having our data go through yet another server, updates are very timely with new tweets arriving on our desktop client at about the same time they do on the phone.


Even if you're a social networking star, the Cliq's home screen is a chaotic mess of chatty widgets that keep you up on the latest Facebook status updates, tweets, messaging and your own postings. Compared to the relatively clean standard Android home screen or even HTC's with Sense UI, this is madness. Moto has extended the home screen to 5 pages from the default 3, so you can spread the mess around and organize it. Thankfully, you can turn off widgets too, just in case you want room for an icon or shortcut or two. Whew.

We do like what Moto has done to contacts: it's no simple list of everyone in your address book (entries are unified from your various social networking services into one contacts list that miraculously resists duplicates). The Cliq with MOTOBLUR has 3 tabs: normal contact listing, history (those folks you've called or conversed with via the many supported services) and status, which is a listing of your contacts' most recent status updates/tweets and etcetera. Pretty cool. You can get to the address book via the blue tab with a head on it at the bottom of the home screen (right side if in landscape mode).