Motorola CLIQ XT hands-on

We know you've barely recovered from our Devour review, but Moto just threw another Blur-ified phone in our laps this afternoon – the CLIQ XT. We've been playing around with the Android 1.5-based, Flash Lite-supported, multitouch-capable handset for the last couple of hours -- but before we grace you with our first impressions, just a fair warning: we don't yet know the price of the new T-Mobile Android handset, though Motorola did promise us that it will hit shelves this month. With that said, hit the break for a quick rundown of our early thoughts.
%Gallery-87806%

• We've been getting off on the right foot with the CLIQ XT. Though it's a bit thick -- it's a tad thinner than the Droid -- the 0.28-pound handset actually feels lighter than we expected, and the rubbery back feels nice in hand. Judge us all you want, but we do think the included purple back is a nice accessory.

• While some may miss the physical keyboard, we're really digging the preloaded Swype virtual keyboard -- we've set it as the default and it's been incredibly accurate in figuring out our text. We do wish that it had a ".com" shortcut, though.

• The clickable touchpad is just fine for maneuvering through smaller menus, but we've been all touchscreen, all the time.

• Speaking of the multitouch feature is everything we dreamed of, pinching to zoom is very responsive in both the newly improved Photo Gallery and in the browser.

• As for Flash Lite, we we're able to watch a YouTube video in the browser when we switched over to the "desktop" version in order to avoid launching the YouTube app. Video was laggy over 3G, but that's to be expected here in New York.

• We'd be remiss not to mention the 5 megapixel cam -- we've taken some nice shots so far with it, though it does seem to be a bit slow to launch

• Overall performance seems good enough, but it's not going to blow you away. Toggling through the Blur menus was snappy and keeping open four browser windows didn't seem to slow too much down.

That's all we got for now -- stay tuned for our full review coming up shortly!