Motorola Cliq XT – revamped Cliq with excellent features

Thumbs Up:

Motorola Cliq XT offers better media player with inbuilt discovery and community features. The smartphone also features excellent call quality, great pictures from 5-megapixel camera, 3G support, Wi-Fi, multi-touch support and Android HTML WebKit browser with Flash Lite.

Thumbs Down:

The operating system is Google Android 1.5. The smartphone has small touch-screen display and does not use pinch-to-zoom in Google Maps.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: WCDMA/GSM
Band: WCDMA 900/1700/2100, GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone Design: Candy Bar
Caller ID: Yes
Other Features: Class 12 GPRS, Class 12 EDGE, HSDPA 7.2Mbps, Wi-Fi, 5-megapixel camera

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Motorola Cliq XT is powered with 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A processor. The carrier is T-Mobile. The smartphone has one SD memory card slot that accepts up to 32GB.

3.1 inches capacitive touch-screen display has HVGA resolution of 320×480 pixels. Motorola Cliq XT has 5-megapixel camera that features auto-focus, LED flash and continuous digital zoom. The smartphone has geo-tagging, rotating and cropping image editing tools.

Motorola Cliq XT has applications for photo sharing Web sites such as Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket, MySpace, Yahoo and Last FM. For messaging it supports My Space, Facebook, and Twitter Direct Messaging.

Messaging features include multimedia and text messaging, instant messaging, push email accounts, synching with MotoBlur, SWYPE keyboard, iTAP and support for POP3/IMAP4/SMTP. Preinstalled instant messengers are MSN, AOL IM, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. The additional features are Android HTML WebKit Browser with Adobe Flash Lite, QuickOffice Suite, support for 20,000 Android applications, Android Market, YouTube, Google Voice Search, Google Talk, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Maps Street View and Gmail.

Motorola Cliq XT has Bluetooth based on Stereo Bluetooth Technology v1.5 that supports profiles of HFP, HSP and A2DP. The smartphone also supports IEEE 802.11 b/g and USB 2.0 High Speed transfer. GPS features include A-GPS, integrated 5-way navigation, E-Compass, Google Maps and turn-by-turn directions.

1420mAH lithium ion battery has a life of 400 minutes talk time and 450 hours of idle standby time in WCDMA. For GSM, the battery life is 450 minutes talk time and 500 hours of idle standby time.

Accessories supplied inside the package are user manual, 2GB micro-SD card, wired stereo headset, metallic purple back plate, USB cable and power adapter.

Razzle Dazzle:

Motorola Cliq XT is 4.59 inches tall, 2.23 inches wide and 0.48 inch deep and it weighs 4.4 ounces. The Cliq XT is lighter, thinner, wider and taller than its predecessor – Motorola Cliq. It feels solid and lightweight while taking in hand. The XT is better pocket friendly device as it does not have slide out keyboard. There is textured pattern on the back of the XT that resembles leatherette back-plate at RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000. Motorola and T-Mobile also supplies additional back cover in metallic purple color, which has soft-touch and smooth finish.

Inside Dope:

Motorola had announced to launch its Cliq XT – smartphone at Mobile World Congress 2010. This smartphone will be the fifth Android phone in the U.S. for both Motorola and T-Mobile. At first look, the XT looks revamped Motorola Cliq. However, it offers sleeker design, improved onscreen keyboard by Swype, connected and full-featured media player and much better performance than Backflip. Motorola Cliq XT has two drawbacks: one is small screen size and next it runs on Google Android 1.5. Obviously, the Cliq XT is better alternative for users who can manage working on onscreen keyboard and need much sleeker smartphone than others. T-Mobile has not yet released any pricing information, but supposed to show off the pricing details in this month.

3.1 inches capacitive touch-screen LCD display of Motorola Cliq XT has HVGA resolution of 320×480 pixels. It is quite similar to that of the Backflip and the Cliq. The LCD is clear and bright sufficiently, still does not have enough vibrancy and sharpness like that of Nexus One and Motorola Droid. We will prefer to have much larger screen size, especially when smartphone has only onscreen keyboard. Despite of 3.1 inches diagonal display, the screen contents look condensed, tinny and squished.

The onscreen Android keyboard of Motorola Cliq XT is cramped that requires extra concentration and time for typing emails and text. We appreciate the Motorola to include alternative Swype software that allows spelling out words when you drag from one letter to another on keyboard using your finger. Swype keyboard was firstly seen on Samsung Omnia II. This software works better and more accurate. We preferred the Swype keyboard and set it as our default one while testing.

Motorola Cliq XT offers proximity sensor, inbuilt accelerometer, multi-touch and pinch-to-zoom features. The latter works in picture gallery and Web browser, but does not function in Google Maps so you have to use onscreen magnify-glass icon. The smartphone also has little LED light above the display that glows intermittently to alert about the notifications of news, messages, updates, calendar appointments, missed calls, and so on.

Like other Android smartphones, navigational touch pad is located in the center beneath the display. Menu and search buttons sits on the left side of touch pad, whereas home and back buttons are located on the right side. The touch pad allows scrolling through lists, switching via home screens and selecting item on pressing it. Both touch pad and touch-screen works perfect in the Motorola Cliq XT. You can hold down the Home key to bring a window that shows all running applications and switching between them.

Micro-USB port and volume rocker is located on the left side, whereas camera activation/capture button and lock/power key on the right side. You will find 3.5mm headphone jack on the top of Motorola Cliq XT. Micro-SD card slot and camera with flash are located at the back.

Both Motorola Cliq XT and its predecessor Cliq runs on Google Android 1.5 operating system and uses MotoBlur interface. Most of their feature set is common. As per general release schedule on Motorola website, Cliq will be upgradeable to upcoming Android 2.1. However, we do not receive any official information about upgrade for Cliq XT. We hope that Motorola will soon announce about the same.

Motorola Cliq XT has improved music player with integrated streamline and connection services. Inside the player, you can search/view videos on GoTV or YouTube, identify songs with SoundHond and stream music through ShoutCast radio. You will also find inbuilt TuneWiki Community inside the player with several components including Music Maps to see what others are listening in nearby location or major cities. We like that players provides ways to discover the music, purchase and share them.

One of the strong features of Motorola Cliq XT is connectivity. MotoBlur merges all your contacts, calendar entries, emails and messages from all inboxes of messages, social networking Web sites and emails to one universal inbox. It also streams new updates, appointments, and happenings from widgets at home screen. The smartphone also offers Android HTML WebKit browser with Flash Lite 8.1, Bluetooth 2.0, Wi-Fi, 3G support and quad-band world roaming.

Motorola Cliq XT offers Android standard applications such as QuickOffice Suite, Google voice search, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Maps and YouTube. It also has other applications like Shazam, Slacker Radio and TeleNav GPS Navigator, and numerous titles in Android market for download. As always, you cannot save the downloaded content and applications to SD card so you have to store them on internal phone memory.

Motorola Cliq XT features 5-megapixel camera with GPS function for geo-tagging, auto-focus, digital zoom and LED flash. It also features MPEG video recording of HVGA resolution at 24fps. The standard video editing option set includes picture quality, white balance and color effects. The smartphone also allows addition of geo and custom tags to the photos.

We captured some still images for testing. The overall picture quality was impressive and good for a mobile camera. The image was vibrant and sharp in the dim light even without flash. We will advise you for not shaking the camera while taking a picture because there is a bit of shutter lag.

We made few calls through quad-band based Motorola Cliq XT via T-Mobile service. The overall call quality was perfect. We received loud and clear sound at our end without any voice distortion or background noise. The callers also received same quality of sound at their end without any background noise. The speakerphone call quality was also very good. Both of us received clear sound with good volume but there was little hiss during breaks in our conversation, which was acceptable. We did not face any problem while pairing Bluetooth headsets from Motorola S9 and Logitech Mobile Traveller.

3G network of T-Mobile was good, but it dropped to EDGE few times. We tried to load some websites and played YouTube videos for testing. Microsoft.com loaded completely in 10 seconds and a Google search took 5 seconds to complete. The YouTube video only buffered prior to playback and after that it played without any problem. Moreover, the MP4 video played back smoothly and the music playback sounded well-balanced and rich on both included wired headset and Bose On-Ear Headphones.

Motorola Cliq XT has same processor like that of Backflip, but it performed better than it. The Cliq XT was able to respond quickly and handled multiple applications at a time. We did not face any crashes or system reboot. Overall, the Cliq XT was a stable and good performance oriented smartphone.

Motorola Cliq XT has 1420mAH lithium ion battery that has a life of 13.5 days of idle standby time and 6.5 hours of talk time. The digital SAR rating is 1.36 watts per kg as per FCC radiation tests.

Nitty Gritty:

If you need a smartphone with excellent call quality, better features, 5-megapixel camera and can overcome with Google Android 1.5 without waiting for Android 2.1, then you can buy Motorola Cliq XT.