Summary :
The Motorola MB501 Cliq XT was released during the Mobile World Congress as the fifth Motorola phone with Android OS to be released for the US market. Moto’s Cliq XT is certainly more than just a retouch of the Motorola Cliq. This phone offers more features, greater performance and sleeker, sophisticated design. It is packaged for customers who liked the Cliq, but could do with much more functionality. Here is an in-depth review of the Motorola Cliq XT to inform you of the merits of this cool little phone.
DESIGN / LOOK AND FEEL
Motorola Cliq XT comes with a similar design structure like that of the Motorola Cliq, but it lacks a physical keyboard that is present in the Cliq. The Cliq XT is also taller, thinner, wider and yet lighter at just 4.4 ounces. The Cliq XT measures 4.59 inches in height, 2.33 inches in width and is 0.48 inches thick. The lack of a physical keyboard gives the Cliq XT a slimmer profile and makes it easier to carry around. The back of the Cliq XT comes in a textured pattern to give the phone a durable and solid feel.
DISPLAY
The Cliq XT has a 3.1 inch HVGA touch screen. The bright light screen comes with 320x480 pixel capacity and offers clear vibrant color resolution. The phone has an onscreen keyboard that is very responsive and easy to use. The phone has multi touch abilities and a pinch-to-zoom feature. There is also an inbuilt accelerometer, a proximity sensor, and a small LED that glows above the screen to alert you of notifications of unread messages, missed calls, calendar appointments and others.
Just under the screen is the usual menu, home, back and other buttons found on Android phones. The Cliq XT offers more with a navigational touch pad that makes it easy to scroll through menus and lists, or to switch home screen panels and to select an item. The navigational pad offers you an option along with just simply using the touch screen.
The left side of the phone contains the Micro-USB port and the volume rocker. On the right are the camera capture/activation key and a power/lock button. On the top is a 3.5mm jack for headphone. The microSD slot, camera and flash are located at the back of the phone.
STORAGE CAPACITY AND PERFORMANCE
Phone book’s capacity is based on the available internal memory of the Cliq XT (plus 250 contacts in the SIM card). Each contact entry can also hold eight phone numbers, one IM handle, four email addresses, a birthday, an anniversary, company name, notes and postal address. You can pair contacts to groups or assign them a dedicated photo or ring tone. The phone uses a 1,420mAh lithium ion battery rated at 6.5 talk time hours and has a standby time of 13.5 days.
FEATURES
The Cliq XT works with a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A processor and is on Android 1.5. This makes it a high performer with the ability to handle several apps without sluggishness or crashes. The phone comes with features such as text and multimedia messaging, vibrate mode, an alarm clock, USB mass storage, a calculator, instant messaging, visual voice mail, stereo Bluetooth, speaker-independent voice dialing, Wi-Fi, GPS navigation and PC syncing. You can also access the Android market online to download paid apps or free video, music and game files.
The phone also supports 3G, Bluetooth 2.0 and a number of dedicated apps such as YouTube app, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Talk, Google voice search, TeleNav, Slacker Radio, Quickoffice suite, Shazam and more.
The Cliq XT scores full points with an amazing music player, which offers a number of integrated, connect services. The player offers many ways to discover new tracks, share track recommendations and purchase tracks easily. The player allows you to stream music from online ShoutCast radio, search and watch videos on GoTV or YouTube and get songs with SoundHound. The player also comes integrated with the TuneWiki Community, which has a number of cool components such as Music Maps. Music Maps is a very cool feature that allows you see what others around your location and in major cities are listening to.
CAMERA/VIDEO
The Cliq XT comes fitted with a 5-megapixel camera and a LED flash. It has auto focus and digital zoom capabilities. There are several standard editing and options such as white balance, color effects and picture quality. The camera also has video capabilities and records video clips at a rate of 24 frames per second with HVGA resolution.
Picture and video quality was very impressive. The camera has very sensitive lens and is able to capture good quality pictures in various background settings. The video mode creates clear and stable video clips with good sound quality.
SOCIAL NETWORKING
Like the Motorola Cliq, The Motorola Cliq XT comes equipped with the MotoBlur application. MotoBlur basically merges and combines your various social network accounts and email accounts, and your contact information into a master list so that you can access them and be updated quite easily. The MotorBlur feature is quite mind blowing and makes connecting and staying in touch so much easier. When you use the phone for the time, you will be prompted to register your social network accounts as well as your email accounts. With the MotoBlur widget on the home screen, you get updates and notifications of happenings in your email and social network accounts in real time. The Cliq XT comes with an Android HTML WebKit browser that allows you access and open various windows. The browser supports Flash Lite 8.1, so viewing flash content like YouTube is not a problem. You can also install dedicated apps for your favorite social networks like FaceBook and Twitter.
CALL/AUDIO QUALITY
The Motorola MB501 Cliq XT on T-Mobile service is a quad band phone that can be used anywhere. After a series of test, we found the Cliq XT to offer quality call and audio performance on the T-Mobile service. The call and audio quality was really great with absolutely no background noise, distortion, or drop calls. The sound was loud and clear and at both ends of the call. The airline automated response system worked like a charm and the speakerphone quality was very impressive too. We tried it with a wireless headset and it gave the same top audio and call quality.
In conclusion, the Motorola MB501 Cliq XT is more that just a pretty phone. It offers a number of attractive features including MotoBlur, which has made connecting and staying in touch on several accounts so easy. The integrated music player, sharp camera and video quality, top audio quality are just some of the many reasons why this is one phone you deserve to have. For class, style and functionality, go for the Moto Cliq XT.