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| Engadget Mobile | 2 Comments |
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1: I like the screen size, since the phone can be small. However, they wasted lots of space watering the appearance of this phone down. If you know anything about marketing, you can see that this phone is catered to a much larger audience than the DROID. It has soft, rounded corners (that marketers will tell you makes them appeal more to women) and customizable battery plates courtesy of t-mobile studio. And it comes in two colors.
2: The software. It's extremely busy and poorly integrated in with the system. Here's how it works; there are a couple of services running in the background that feed data to a collection of widgets and custom programs that can be called up on demand. The home screen is configured by default to have the 'happenings' widget front center. The problem with this is that Motorola has decided that the best design choice is to have several widgets, that are disconnected, in the foreground but attach at a hub in the background. Now, this makes sense from a battery point of view (somewhat) by unifying the data collection into one program so that it can schedule radio use. However, from a user point of view this is kind of terrible. The software doesn't talk well with other widgets, and they refresh at different (obscure) intervals. I need a fully customizable hub that connects my services in a logical way so that for each service each action makes sense. I want one application that I can pull up to update everything and check everything at the same time. I want emails from work up top, emails from my personal account under that, and things like facebook status and twitter updates even lower, and in separate categories.
3: The hardware: I love it. With the case on it, this phone feels solid, like it will last the whole two year contract and probably knock out some teeth along the way. With the case off however, this slick rounded wafer just slides into your pocket. Its great- get an email, feel the vibrating alert, slide the puck out of your pocket, punch your reply out on the keyboard, push enter and you're already sliding it back into your pocket. Totally works. Also, interestingly enough, the audio fidelity from the headphone jack is way better than the iphone's. By far. Not as loud though...
4: The service. Here is the contention for me. I was told by a couple of T-Mobile reps that my area would be getting 3G by years end. So, when the Cliq came out (and prior to the DROID announcement) I picked it up, and switched carriers from AT&T and sold my iPhone. Now that I've done all that, my reps are telling me that people are saying that it'll be MAY before my area gets 3G. I called the support line, and my consultant wasn't able to list any roll-out of 3G for my state at all! Needless to say, this is an important change, especially working in IT.
5: Motorola's shady customer PR: So, fact is that BLUR is messy, and truth be told it doesn't work all that well. Now, everyone sees what the DROID can do with its 2.0 features and we all ask, "Where is 2.0" and all we get are comments like "can't comment at the moment, but if you want an Android 2.0, look at the Motorola DROID." So what does that mean to Cliq users? If you're a power user, you'll likely get hosed. This device is squared cleanly on young adults, tech kids, women, and sidekick users. It makes more sense for this device to fill that lower price bracket. So to differentiate, the CLIQ (in my opinion) will have a 1.6 (donut?) update and then stop. There has got to be differentiation between the two products or else they will eat each others customer base. That's great for T-Mobile but not so great for Verizon.
Anyway, I am le tired.
Retiring for the night...