Review: Motorola CLIQ
Screen
The CLIQ's display measures 3.1 inches are comes in at 320 x 480 pixels. It looks good, but doesn't hold a candle to the AMOLED displays from Samsung or the HTC HD2, for that matter. It is bright enough both indoors and out, and is colorful, no doubt. Given the size of the phone, I wish the display were a couple tenths of an inch bigger, though.
Signal
In a word, horrid. Where I live and tested this phone, there is ample 3G coverage from T-Mobile, yet the CLIQ barely connected to T-Mobile's 3G network. Most of the time, it fell back to EDGE. This made for terrible web and data performance. A phone such as the CLIQ needs 3G all the time to really be useful. On top of that, the CLIQ's EDGE performance was all over the map. According to other reviewers I spoke to in Chicago and Brooklyn, they were experiencing the same 3G issue. Motorola generally excels at making phones that are good phones. The CLIQ fails the signal test, and that surprises me a lot.
Sound
The CLIQ's ringer wasn't quite loud enough for me. Set all the way up, I wouldn't be surprised if you miss calls in noisy places such as coffee shops. If you're in a bar, set it to vibrate, there's no way you're going to hear it. As for the earpiece, volume here was much better. In noisy places, I could (mostly) hear conversations, and heard no complaints from my callers. On the quality front, phone calls did sound clear and were free of static, noise and other cellular nonsense. The speakerphone was loud enough for a quiet office, but not sufficient for any of the environments I announced above.
Battery
In a word, abysmal. We're talking hours, not days. With MOTOBLUR running, the CLIQ got 7 hours of battery life from a full charge. That's unacceptable for any phone. I adjusted every setting I could (screen brightness, radios off, etc.) over successive days, and at best was only able to get 12 hours of battery life before the CLIQ completely shut down. I asked Motorola about it, and they swear that MOTOBLUR has been optimized for battery performance. Hell, the battery inside the CLIQ is ginormous. I have to assume that the sheer number of Twitter updates that stream into the CLIQ (for me, because I follow about 2300 people) is the cause here. Six hours of talk time? Thirteen days of stand-by? Um, no.
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Motorola Cliq
