The Motorola CLIQ, a new Android smartphone from Motorola with a bevy of social networking features, is now shipping. The phone is the first to employ Motoblur, a software integrating various social networking and communication functions for ease of use. We reviewed the CLIQ a few weeks ago and thought it had much promise, despite some issues with a sluggish processor. The phone is available through T-Mobile for $199.99 after discount. [T-Mobile]

Also available today is the SkyDock from XM, the first device to let drivers control satellite radio with their iPhone or iPod Touch. Though it didn't knock our socks off when we tried it, the SkyDock does deliver on its promise and is currently the only way to tap into XM radio in the car via the iPhone. Available from the Apple Store, Best Buy, Radio Shack and other retailers for $120, the SkyDock is powered by the car's DC plug and allows listeners to tag songs on XM for later purchase through the iTunes music store. But of course. [XM]

The Motorola Cliq is the Android OS on Motorola hardware. Like Palm before it, Motorola decided that Windows Mobile 6.5/7 would be too little, too late to combat the iPhone menace. But instead of going in house and creating something from scratch, Motorola decided to take an already stable OS and build social networking features directly into the interface. So yes, it's basically an Android phone; but it's an Android phone++.

Motorola's Cliq delivers on its social networking promise quite admirably, even if there are a few design quirks that prevent the experience from being perfect. And although it's a little sluggish on the hardware side—as sluggish as any of the other Android phones out there now, that is—the fact that it has a good physical keyboard and solid Motorola hardware behind it makes the Cliq a very interesting contender in the Android world.

The Hardware is solid, except when it's not

Moto is no stranger to building its own phones, so you'd expect some smart hardware know-how to go into Cliq's design. That's only kinda true. Everything on the phone is where you'd expect it to be and buttons are more-or-less in acceptable locations, but there's a looseness in the slide-out keyboard that's more irritating the more I play with it. I can't tell if it's because the slider doesn't quite lock into place like it should—there's a little give in both the open and closed positions—but the "Oreo-ing" is really distracting. It's not as if the screen portion will pop off, it's just an annoying looseness in the phone that makes you feel like they didn't quite solve the puzzle of fitting everything in place.

A hardware keyboard is always a welcome thing to have, and the Cliq's behaves well. There's enough spacing in each of the keys that it's easy to type, but not too much that it's occupying a lot of space. There could have been some better arrangement of symbol keys (the underscore is buried under a symbols menu), but that's just being nitpicky. Overall, it's a solid keyboard that's quick to enter data with.

Other build quirks

The wobbliness of the slider means that you need to grip only the bottom (keyboard) part of the phone when you're taking a photo, or else the screen will slide open and you'll probably drop your phone. Also, Motorola decided to make the power switch flush with the right side of the phone so even Daredevil would have a hard time finding it by touch. Since the power button also lets you toggle Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, airplane mode and GPS, that's a bad design.

You have to open up the battery cover to shove an up-to 32GB microSD card in there, but since you'll rarely replace that (use a microUSB to transfer files), it's not a huge deal. I do like the fact that there's no cover on the microSD slot, as well as the presence of the now-obligatory vibrate toggle on the left side of the phone. Its 3.5mm headphone jack being located directly on the top of the phone kinda screws up the lines a bit, but I'd rather a slightly uglier phone than not having a 3.5mm jack.

Power and battery

Because the Cliq runs the same processor as the current Android phones now—like the Hero and the MyTouch 3G—there's not a whole lot of performance difference between the devices. They're all kinda slow. Not unusably slow, but transitions and animations don't pop immediately. And this sluggishness might be part of the reason why interacting with the touchscreen isn't as fluid a process as it could be, and why sometimes when you're swiping between emails or tweets, the page will pop back into place and you have to swipe a second time.

As for the battery life, you can pretty much imagine how much use you'll get out of an always-connected device that gets pushed emails, tweets and Facebook updates all day. Even if you don't make a lot of calls, you'll have to charge the device every night. And if you do do a lot of texting and emailing and calling and tweeting, you'd better get an external charger.

The main drain seems to be both the push and the fact that you're using the phone a lot to keep up with everything that's happening on your social networks. Motorola built a double-edged sword on that one; people want to use it a lot for checking status updates, but in turn the 1420 mAh battery runs out in less than a day.

Hardware features we like

There are a couple nice touches that we're appreciative of, such as the blinking light on the front for notifications, which has been on BlackBerries for a while. Great if you don't get a lot of emails or if you don't follow a lot of people. You can also wake up the phone using the facebuttons, not just the power toggle, so two quick menu button presses will get you to the home screen immediately.

Having a D pad is going to be useful in the future when Android developers start making games that take advantage of it, but you can use it now in NES/SNES emulators. And the camera is a beefy 5-megapixel autofocus, which produces decent photos compared to other Android phones. Plus, call quality is pretty good, something Motorola has managed to do well even when their software has faltered.

Software

Seeing as Android has been available for more than a while, and everyone should be familiar with what it does, I'm going to focus on the Cliq-specific sections. Suffice it to say that it can do everything other Android phones can, including downloading OTA Amazon MP3s and accessing all the apps in the Marketplace. The most important of Motorola's additions are the home screen widgets, so we'll start there.

The home screen widgets

The four widgets of note are the status widget, the messaging widget, the happenings widget and the news/RSS widget. The news widget is self-explanatory, and really cool that a phone would have a built-in RSS reader right on the home screen, but the others are a little bit trickier. The status widget lets you update your "status" to any of your social networking sites, like Facebook or Twitter. The messages widget consolidates ALL your 1:1 messaging, like emails, SMS, DMs on Twitter or private messages on Facebook. The happenings is a feed of other people's status updates on your social networks.

Messaging Widget
I don't know why, but it's very satisfying to be able to swipe through your emails directly from the home screen, quickly deleting or replying with just one tap. The problem comes from the way it's implemented and the lack of screen space, because you can't see the recipients list to see if you're the only person address to in an email, nor can you do a reply all if there are multiple people. And it doesn't tell you if you have an attachment.

Basically it's just a small window to your email, and you'll have to actually open up the traditional email app to do any communication beyond the basics. And there's also a full-blown Messaging APP, which consolidates all your accounts like the widget does.

Happenings Widget
This is where your all your social networks are rolled into one big feed. Again, it's a time saver to have all these updates in one place and being able to swipe through them, though sometimes you get way too many updates to realistically do so. What we would like is if there was an option to customize which networks displayed in the widget, so we could, say, have only Twitter and leave out Facebook. Right now it's an all or nothing affair, and you have to go into the Happenings app to see everything in list form and to be able to view only one network at a time.

The widget does allow you to directly interact and respond to people's updates, so you can comment on people's walls or do an @reply to someone's tweet. All you have to do is start typing in a particular section and some menu option will pop up, prompting you with context-specific actions you can do.

News Widget
The RSS widget behaves pretty much the same way as the previous two, allowing you to swipe through news items like you would in a standard RSS reader. Motorola was kind enough to bundle a few types of RSS feeds together, and Gizmodo is part of the Technology one. Good choice dudes.

Nice touches

By avoiding the creation of an entire operation system from scratch, the Motorola engineers had time on their hands to really think about the user experience, and it definitely shows in all these small touches and shortcuts they put in.

• There are some slick transition animations when you open up widgets and apps, which are quick enough to not be distracting, but slow enough to distract you for a second while your program is loading
• Faces are fetched and attached to your contacts automatically, and you can choose whether you want to grab the images from Google or Facebook. This way you can always have some kind of picture for a person when they call you for easy recognition
• The MotoBlur account you have to create on setup backs up some of your settings so that you can re-load it in the event of phone theft
• Speaking of phone stealing, there's a free service online that's similar to MobileMe that you can use to locate your phone from the web
• There's a five panel home screen. Eh? Ehh??
• The call button got moved to a soft button, eliminating the need for two hard buttons on the outside of the phone. You also get a contacts button instead of a end call button, since you don't need to hang up if you're not in a call.
• There's visual voicemail
• People's faces everywhere, and you can see their latest status updates when a call is initiated
• You can manually link contacts together, like on Palm's webOS, in case the phone doesn't automatically recognize that Frucci is the same Adam Frucci you have in your Gmail
• A self help widget is there when you get the phone, walking you through a few features you might not see
• There are shortcuts everywhere, which would usually be a bad thing since you have to poke around to find them, but they're implemented in such a way that it actually makes sense
• You can type on the home screen to find a contact. This makes sense in the Moto Cliq world since the Cliq is a person-centric device, whereas on other phones it would make more sense to bring up a Google search instead
• And typing in the applications tray searches through your apps

Gripes

The software's not flawless, however, and you will run into some minor annoyances even with all the niceties.
• Yahoo Mail only works over 3G, not Wi-Fi. This most likely has to do with some deal or legal restriction, but it doesn't make the decision less annoying. If we had to choose between Yahoo only on 3G and no Yahoo, we'd pick the 3G
• There isn't really desktop syncing for your contacts or calendar. You can send movies and music and photos over the microUSB connection, but Motorola really wants you to put your contacts on either Gmail or a social network and pull them down that way

You don't get a lot of fine-grained control over accounts. (Yes, I made you wait this long for a pun on the top photo.) For example, you can't tell your phone to only pull down contacts from Gmail and not Facebook, or choose to display only your Twitter and MySpace contacts at once. It's basically all or just one. More account customizability would be the number one software target we'd ask Motorola's team to aim for, and something we're eager to see in Blur version 1.5.

The Whole Experience

Like we said in the hardware section, the major thing holding back the Cliq from being a fantastic phone is the processor. The animations are smooth, the UI touches are smart and the social networking stuff is useful; we just wish we could have a bit more account customization, do all of that on faster hardware. Once Motorola gets the Blur platform onto a more powerful phone and works through some of the software quirks we noticed, they're going to have a really good Android phone on their hands.

Is this the phone that Motorola needs to bring it back into the smartphone race? It could be. They were smart enough to know that just doing another Android phone wasn't enough in itself, so they pulled together and created all this social networking glue to bind the experience together. It's cohesive enough to call the Cliq a different experience from other, similar devices like the Sprint HTC Hero, and is a pretty damn good first step in a possible Motorola comeback. [Motorola]

Social networking features are quite good

Lots of little touches that improve on the base Android platform

Hardware keyboard

Decent hardware except for the Oreo-like keyboard action

It's an Android phone at heart, which means you'll either like it or dislike it, based on how you feel about the platform

A slow-ish CPU makes the experience weaker than it could be

T-Mobile also says that their voice plans start at $30 a month, with the accompanying data plan costing another $25 a month. [T-Mobile]

Hardware

The phone is significantly smaller in person than it looked in photos—it's thinner than the T-Mobile G1 and feels very comfortable in the hand. It's got an interesting array of buttons, some nice additions and some mysteriously absent. There's no dedicated call button on the front of the phone, replaced instead by a soft button on the homescreen. The 3.5mm headphone jack is on the top of the device (when the keyboard is closed) and the right side holds the power button and the camera button. The left side holds the volume rocker, silent switch and microUSB charging slot.

On the front of the phone are three hardware buttons: Menu, Home, and Back. A long press on the Menu button, or navigating into any text-input area, brings up a soft keyboard, a nice option for when you just want to jot a few words down (or want one-handed operation). The Cliq's screen was pretty good, and is capacitive, and bright and responsive. It's as good as the other HTC Android phones, as a reference.

But the slide-out keyboard, which feels very sturdy and types quite nicely, is packing a D-pad that'll let you navigate through the cards, contacts, and more, like a D-Pad, and should come in very handy for future gaming. The keyboard is really nice-feeling: The keys are large and well-spaced, and there's no awkward hump to navigate around like on the G1. It's very HTC-like in that it's generous, but rises up higher than most HTC phones that we've seen.

This clip shows the home screen's functionality: I tap the Happenings widget, browse through a few new status updates, tap one Facebook friend's name, and up comes his entire, aggregated contact info. Stalking ahoy!

Software

The Motorola Blur isn't a skin like HTC's Sense UI, but more of a collection of widgets and ways to use them. It places social networking front and center, with most of the homescreen taken up with the two main cards, Happenings and Messages. Happenings aggregates all updates from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace, and while those three are the extent of the Cliq's supported networks, Motorola confirmed that it's extremely easy to add more social networking protocols. Messages just aggregates all your messages from every social network you're signed up for—Facebook, Email, SMS, IMs, whatever.

The social networking is very deeply integrated into the phone. For example, if you click on a contact anywhere under any social network, it'll give you the full contact information for every social network that guy belongs to. From there, you communicate with him through any network.

As for speed, it's pretty similar to other Android phones on the market now, like the Ion or the Hero. It's not faster, and it's not as smooth as say, the iPhone or the Pre, but the transitions are nice and it's not sluggish by any means. The accelerometer was slower than the iPhone's, but it wasn't that much slower.

It's definitely an Android phone, and can run all the Android apps you're accustomed to. You can still take the Android apps and drop them onto the Home screen, alongside all the fancy social networking widgets. It's pretty cool that manufacturers can take an Android phone and target it towards certain markets, like people who REALLY love social networking. There could be a business one later, that's focused on harassing people to join your LinkedIn list. Or email. Or whatever they come up with.

I asked Andy about the Cliq, and whether its heavy-emphasis on social networking would make its way into the core Android OS. He said yes, that Google likes the idea of say, Facebook or Twitter being a part of the core functionality rather than having to open a separate app to get to where you want to be.

Andy also said that there wasn't a huge differentiation between in-house and third-party when it's an open source, open platform effort like Android, so he wasn't sure who would be the team that would make something like Facebook integration happen—be it Google or Facebook.

Also interesting is his views on the Cliq as a whole. He said that he considers this something he would be happy launching as a 1.0 product—the point being that the bugs were worked out, and the extras like the social networking were there. The original Android launch, he says, was more like a 0.8 release.

The bit that's interesting to Android developers is that Rubin doesn't consider the Marketplace done, as in, they're still working on optimizing and making the experience better for both the consumer and the app maker. One of the complaints that paid apps had was that they didn't sell as much as say, a paid app on the iPhone App Store. Andy said they've been working gradually and iteratively, first separating paid apps from free apps, and then working on improving visibility of the apps themselves. So it's something they're aware of, and the fact that the "best" selling apps are only doing somewhere along the lines of 1000s of sales isn't going ignored among the Android people.

As for future Android OS development, Andy claims that you can expect more of the type of things Motorola has done, that is, replacing some of the core apps and core functionality the default Android offers with customized ones like the Cliq's social network streaming and integration.

Compared to the G1 this thing is svelte, and the keyboard is aligned correctly with the screen so there's no weird jarring going on when you're typing. The addition of the D-Pad, like we noted in the liveblog, is going to be fantastic for gaming/emulation gaming, and works like a D-Pad when navigating the phone as well. Very useful.

The sliding mechanism feels solid and desirable, as in, I want to open and close the thing all day just to hear the sound. The version I saw was white, and the finish was classy without being ostentatious, and definitely not cheap feeling. There's a heft to it, but it's definitely not heavy.

No hands-on photos yet, so you'll have to take another look at the press shots:

The Morisson, if that's what we have here, is a QWERTY slider in the tradition of the G1, though judging by the bright styling, generously-size d-pad and smooth lines, it seems to be oriented toward a broader audience than its blocky T-Mobile stablemate. In fact, the Morrison would sooner pass as a messaging-centric feature phone than a full-fledged smartphone. Granted, this is a spy pic; it could just as well be either (or neither) of those things.

But think about the possibility for a minute: Android is said to be relatively scalable, it's free, and it would doubtlessly blow the half-baked proprietary OSes on the likes of the Pantech Duo out of the water. I'd say a cheap Android phone is overdue; we'll just have to see if that's what Motorola has in mind. [Mini-suit via Phandroid]

The Pre-likeness goes beyond the shape and style of the slider—the front panel is touch-sensitive too. Besides that it's got 3G, Wi-Fi, a high-res camera and a "screamin' CPU." Okay, I'm starting to the like the idea of Android running on this a bit more. And besides, given Tony Stark's fondness for dinky LG handsets in the movie, maybe he would use this. What kind of phone do you think Tony would use, anyway? [Boy Genius]

BGR says the QWERTY slider will focus on social networking—presumably in the same vein as the new Sidekick. I have a bit of doubt about that flat not-so-touch-type-y keyboard, but still, color me impressed: Futuretastic-looking hardware running Android on Verizon? As long as they don't lock it the hell down, could be sweet, and not just for Moto, who needs a hit phone, or Verizon, who just needs better phones. [BGR]

Dave says that Motorola imagines the Media Mover as a "Swiss Army knife" of USB gadgets. It'll transcode lots of different video on your DVR and broadcast it locally or remotely over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, kinda like Sling. Motorola was demoing it sending video to a Moto Q9M, iPhone (pictured) and a laptop. It's also got a low-res nanny cam built inside, so you can watch how much of the good wine they're drinking on your iPhone.

No price or date yet, but it's supposed to be "low cost." [ZatzNotFunny]

The big thing with the evoke is the screen and the UI. This isn't really a powerhouse multimedia phone, a corporate battle ax, or the king of web phones. Sure, you can view a photo or two, listen to some music and check the news, but that is the extent of it's scope.

The touchscreen is actually pretty nice. I never had to press very hard for it to recognize my finger, and was accurate enough to where I was pretty much able to carry out actions without having to retap or backtrack. The screen also has haptic feedback, so you know when and where your input is being recognized. The screen itself was nice and bright, but I wouldn't put it on the same level as screens found on the top smartphones.

The UI also had some cool stuff going on, including a homepage with a handful of Palm Pre "card"-like internet widgets. These connect to services like MySpace, Picasa, any RSS feed and even Google, to simplify the internet experience on this phone. And it's necessary too, because the browser that comes packaged with the phone isn't all that great. The main menu has the standard, touch-based icon grid that has come to dominate Phone UIs over the last couple years, and swiping up and down lets you scroll through the array of icons that are off the screen.

The Evoke has an oblong, pebble-shaped design with rounded corners that let it sit naturally in your hand. The slide out number-pad is flat, not unlike that found on phones like the Ocean 2 or the Pantech Matrix. It seems like it might be a good phone if you want something that's basic, but not boring.

We'd heard about the layoffs and Androids push, but not that drastic. If they're cutting half of the handset division, what's happening to the huge 350-man Android team? It was already going to take them until Christmas to pop out a phone.

Moto's also apparently going to be a no-show at CTIA, a wireless trade show that's the biggest one in North America (though totally dwarfed by Mobile World Congress). Granted, since CTIA is typically more of a CDMA venue and Sprint's already popped their big phone (the Pre), it might be a crappy show this year anyway, but I digress. If true, it suggests Motorola's got nothing to show, and definitely nothing of the Android variety, even in its earliest fetal form, which would go a long way to restoring some confidence in the company.

No wonder Motorola's not letting anyone jump on lifeboats headed toward HMCS RIM. [Phonescoop]

Features:

•DMB support
•E-wallet function
•3.5mm headphone jack
•USB 2.0 connectivity
•Bluetooth 2.0
•Memory card slot
•2.8" 260k color TFT touchscreen at 240 x 400 resolution
•3 megapixel camera

Whether or not it will be bossing fatties around in the states anytime soon has not been determined.
[Uberphones and AVING]

Obviously this slider, codenamed Niagra, is a pretty large departure from the Razr tradition—it's a slider, after all. But its lineage would appear to be undeniable, considering the distinctive keypad, thin profile and metallic finish. That said, all of the vowels in the name appear to be vital to pronunciation, so the bloodline can't be totally pure.

As for the Fairbanks and Harmony clamshell phones (below), there is little reason to believe that these are anything but a minor update to Moto's existing entry-level free-on-contract handsets. As with the smartphone leak, these renders came naked. In other words specs, prices and release dates are still a mystery, albeit one that will certainly be solved, unspectacularly, with some form of press release. [BGR via Slashphone]

[Howard Forums via Unwired View]

“I stopped and I lifted up my sweatshirt and I took out the cell phone to check it to see if it was damaged and this bullet falls out,” Richard told the local CBS affiliate WWL. He said the shot—which was strong enough to tear a hole in his sweatshirt—felt like a punch to the chest.

Investigators said that the bullet could have come from as far away as a quarter of a mile, and that people shoot guns in that area all the time.

“We have no reason to believe that there was any type of criminal intent,” Sheriff Jack Strain told WWL. “That this truly was just an incident where someone discharged his weapon, whether it was target practicing or hunting." He did add though, "To have such an impact at such a vital location and to be saved by your cell phone, I'm sure has given [Richard] time for pause, and to be thankful.”

Well, Motorola, it seems this Thanksgiving at least one customer is going to thank you for saving its life—probably one more than Samsung, Nokia or even Apple can claim. [WWL-TV (check out the video) via AP, Thanks, David]