The growing lineup of Android-powered devices has a new entry arriving Oct. 19. That’s the date the Motorola CLIQ will be available to current customers, T-Mobile announced Tuesday. Others will be able to buy Motorola’s first device for the Android open-source operating system on Nov. 2. The price is $199.99 with a two-year contract.
Automatic Syncing
The CLIQ comes with a slide-out keyboard and a 3.1-inch HVGA touchscreen and features 3G, Wi-Fi, a five-megapixel autofocus camera with 24 fps video, a music player with the Amazon MP3 store app preloaded, and such Google applications as Search by voice, Google Maps with Street View, YouTube and Picasa.
Motorola is also promoting the CLIQ’s management and integration tool for communications, called Motorblur. With Motorblur, updates to contacts, posts, messages, photos and other communications are interrelated and synced with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Gmail and work e-mail. Updates are automatically delivered, so the user doesn’t need to open different mobile applications.
The CLIQ, said Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha when the device was announced earlier this month, “differentiates the Android experience for consumers by being the only smartphone that automatically syncs conversations, contacts and content, and delivers a solution that’s instinctive, social and smart.”
Ramon Llamas, a research analyst in mobility at IDC, gave the CLIQ a “thumbs up.” The new device, he said, “seems so darn intuitive” and makes “the user the center of it all.” If someone wants a “very slick social-networking device,” he said, “the CLIQ delivers.”
The social-networking features also got a positive review from Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis. The CLIQ, he said, “has a strong set of social-networking features” built on top of Android, and a “good, sliding physical QWERTY keyboard.”
‘Way Beyond Plain Vanilla’
Greengart said the CLIQ compares very well to T-Mobile’s G1, the first Android device on the…