Motorola Cliq XT The keyboard-less counterpart to the Motorola Cliq on T-Mobile brings its own special sauce in the form of custom multimedia applications, a higher resolution camera and Swype on-screen keyboard input. The Cliq XT has a 3.1" HVGA capacitive touch screen and it runs on a 528MHz Qualcomm CPU. Like the Cliq and Backflip, it runs MOTOBLUR social networking software on top of Android 1.5. The Cliq has a GPS that works with Google Maps and Telenav, MS Exchange support, plenty of social networking integration, WiFi and Bluetooth. The 3G Cliq XT has excellent voice quality and a pretty decent camera.
The Cliq XT, like the Cliq is a bit outclassed among Motorola's Android offerings when it comes to looks. The Motorola Droid is of course a high end phone and it looks the part. Even the Moto Devour's casing is metal and the Motorola Backflip on AT&T is made of alloy and plastics that speak of quality. Neither the Cliq or the Cliq XT try to dress it up: they're 100% plastic phones. The Cliq XT is the odd man out, neither resembling the small, rounded Cliq and Backflip nor sharing the angular, modern design of the Droid and Devour. In fact, it looks more like an Asian market phone, and if the branding were gone, our first guess would be that Samsung made this phone.
The Cliq XT is a bar style touch screen phone that's surprisingly large given the relatively small 3.1" display. It's almost as big as the high end, high res Nexus One whose screen is a half inch larger. All that space allows for large buttons and an oversized trackpad that sit below the display. These are mechanical buttons that go "click" rather than touch sensitive buttons: a relative rarity on Moto Android phones. Once you become accustomed to a good touch sensitive button implementation, it's hard to go back to mechanical buttons, especially ones with lots of travel like the XT. The trackpad works like a tiny version of a laptop trackpad, and given the small size, it's not that easy to use (but easier than the super-tiny trackpads we've seen on some Samsung Windows Mobile phones).
Like all Android phones, the Cliq XT has an excellent webkit web browser, email (POP3, IMAP and Gmail) and it can sync calendar and contacts with Google's services. MOTOBLUR adds good MS Exchange support (email, calendar and contacts) and contacts integration with Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. You can download free and paid applications via the Android Market application on the phone and it has support for Amazon's MP3 store. We particularly like the custom music and video application that can download album covers and lyrics on the fly. It integrates with TuneWiki and also comes with SoundHound (a free music ID service). The application also handles music video playback (YouTube and GoTV channels), FM radio (a 3.5mm standard stereo headset is required but not included) and locally stored video playback. Given vanilla Android's bland handling of multimedia, the Music app is a blessing.
Camera and GPS
Like the Backflip, the Cliq XT is a mid-priced Android phone with a better than middling camera. The 5 megapixel camera with autofocus lens takes nice shots, though they're a bit over-sharpened. Colors are saturated and natural and images don't look terribly over-processed other than the sharpening. The camera can also shoot video, though at a less impressive CIF 352 x 288 pixel resolution. The camera can geotag images and the GPS managed to get a fix quickly.