Imagine how you'd feel if you peaked in middle school. That's pretty much what happened to cell phone maker Motorola Inc., which had a megahit in 2005 with its Razr handset but has since failed to fashion another that can approach its popularity. Now that the rest of the cell phone market has matured and feature-packed “smart” phones are becoming the choice of many consumers, Motorola hopes to entice people with the Cliq, its first phone that uses Google's Android software. The twist in the Cliq is that it combines social-networking features with slick hardware. The Cliq looks sharp but not too original on the surface: Its front is dominated by a brilliant 3.1-inch touch screen and a few navigation buttons, while a spacious full-sized keyboard with a multidirectional controller slides out from the side. A standard headphone jack sits on the top. Turn the Cliq on, however, and it's quite the social butterfly. A little application “widget” on the home screen dubbed “Happenings” constantly refreshes your friends' latest updates to Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. Another widget aggregates all the messages you get from various social networks and e-mail accounts and gives a preview of the latest one. A third widget shows your most recent status update and lets you easily update one or several social networks at a time. The Cliq's never-ending deluge of data about your clique comes courtesy of Motorola's new Motoblur software, which gathers information from your various social Web and e-mail accounts. All you have to do is set up your accounts and pick which one the Cliq should primarily pull photos from, so it can integrate your friends' photos with their messages and updates. The Cliq takes all this data aggregation beyond the home screen, too, creating an ambitious yet somewhat messy master contact list that includes your friends' contact info and vital stats such as their birthdays. This contact conglomeration is both cool and cumbersome. If you get sick of having all this information in your face, there is an option to filter your contact list so the Cliq shows just your Facebook friends or the contacts whose numbers you have stored on your phone's SIM card. Beyond all its social bells and whistles, a 5-megapixel camera also helps the Cliq stand out. It can take sharper photos than most of its contemporaries – including Apple Inc.'s iPhone. Sadly, my fun with the Cliq was often cut short, as its battery lasts about as long as a trending topic on Twitter. Usually, I barely got a full day's worth of charge out of it, even when I wasn't watching any videos, listening to tunes or opening the Web browser. I started to wonder if this was because of all the widgets I had running on the phone – I used five of them, including two that fed me the latest news and entertainment info. There were other problems, too. Not infrequently, the phone would freeze and give me an apologetic error message, telling me that an application was not responding and that I could wait or force it to close. Despite its desire to bring me the latest “Happenings,” that widget in particular seemed to experience performance anxiety, stuttering or failing to give me the next status update when I swiped my finger across the screen.
