Motorola announced its first Android operating system-based device, the Cliq yesterday. The hardware is beautifully designed while the software makes a serious attempt to incorporate social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. But more importantly, the future of Motorola may ride partially on the success of the Cliq.

First off, let’s just say the handset gets a lot of things right: The phone itself is nicely designed and feels impossibly thin (for a slider), the touchscreen is responsive and the social networking options are subtly ingrained into the phone — they don’t come out and slap you in the face.

But let’s also say this that the Cliq suffers from feature overload. The UI is messy and challenging to learn — it attempts to bring together too many mobile features and can be confusing and clogged. We suspect that after a few days with the device, it would become easy to master. But right off the bat, operating the phone left us befuddled.

The Cliq’s coming out party was September 9, and then we got the device behind closed doors. Here are the highlights.

Hardware

The Cliq is lovely to hold. It feels quite slim (about 0.62 inches thick) and light (weighing 5.6 ounces). Comparatively, the Palm Pre is 0.67 inches thick and weighs 4.76 ounces, while the iPhone 3G is 0.48 inches thick and weighs 4.7 ounces. The sliding keyboard on the Cliq is smooth and the physical(!) keypad offers fantastic tactile feedback, making touch-typing a very real possibility. The phone comes in a polished black the company calls “Titanium” and “Winter White.” The 3.1-inch display is bright and easy to read — at least under the florescent lighting where we put the phone through its paces. The screen is touch capable and very, very responsive. It’s certainly on par with the iPhone.

Source: Wired News