Motorola Cliq (titanium, T-Mobile)

Pros: Compact slick design with a slide-out keyboard, 5MP camera and video, Android OS, many free and inexpensive apps, great battery life, excellent call quality and speakerphone, MOTOBLUR, 5 home screens, AWESOME widgets, and dirt cheap Unlimited Plans!

Cons: Comes with Android 1.5 but rumored to get free upgrade to 2.0 in the New Year. No way to limit which social networking contacts that are synced (e.g. all your Facebook friends are added) which is a pain when using your Happenings Widget.

Summary: While the Motorola DROID is getting a lot of air time for Verizon, the Motorola Cliq for some reason is getting almost no advertising from TMobile. When in fact, TMobile should be praising this wonderful piece of technology. Not only is the Cliq very slick and modern looking, but it does nearly everything the DROID does with some of the cheapest unlimited data plans currently in the world with no contract. It also should be noted that in most of the video reviews I've seen the phone appears larger than it actually is. Maybe they have tiny hands, but from my experience it's actually very compact and nearly unnoticeable in my pocket.

The phone works great and runs nearly everything available for Android. The only downside is that the DROID comes with Android 2.0 and a camera flash. On the plus side, the Cliq has a better keyboard, a more compact design, should be sending out a free Android update in early 2010, and again I have to mention the dirt-cheap TMobile data plans. I'm paying $69/month for 1000 anytime mins, nights & weekends free, no roaming charges, unlimited text, unlimited wireless Web data, and I have no contract. For big talkers you can do the unlimited talk/text/web for $79 and if the prospect of paying for your entire phone seems a bit overwhelming (for the Get More Plus "no contract" plans), TMobile offers a pay as you go option in the form of a monthly bill just for the hardware. If you do the math, you'll see that all contract plans where cell companies subsidize the cost of the phone, are MUCH more expensive over 2 years than if you paid for your phone yourself. Plus you'll keep paying a higher monthly premium for subsidized plans even after the phone has been long paid for.

As for battery life, I've found that it's a pretty standard 6-hour lifespan, however if I shut off WiFi when I'm not using it, use the 15-sec display turn off, and lower the brightness to the lowest possible setting, I can still see everything VERY clearly and my battery life nearly triples with normal usage.

But the real genius of the phone lies within the Android OS. It a pleasure to work with and really gives you a sense of control allowing you to modify nearly every aspect of your smart phone. On top of this, the Cliq comes with Motorola's MOTOBLUR software which is one of the best contact management systems I've ever used. It attempts to link all your contacts from Facebook, Myspace, Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, MSN, and more into a single contact record for each. I've only seen one or two errors from the automated linking, but they're easy enough to correct and it's just as easy to manually combine contacts that seem unrelated due to different usernames or email addresses, etc.

Overall I think the Cliq is an amazing piece of technology and I highly recommend it to anyone whose looking for an excellent smart phone with smart monthly plans that doesn't want to get ripped off by cell companies in the process.

Updated on Jan 15, 2010

I thought it should be noted that I recently had a small issue with my Cliq. The lights on three of the keys on the keyboard stopped working. So I called TMobile Customer Service and they sent a brand new phone to me within a few days and the packaging so that I can send my old phone back to them, postage paid and all. But that's not all of what I was impressed with.

When I turned on my new phone, it first asks for me to log into my MOTOBLUR account. Upon connection, MOTOBLUR immediately started to download all my contacts and then started to setup my phone as close as possible to the way it was on my last sync, just short of downloading the same apps for me. It was very very impressive and has saved me hours of work. In fact, I'm so thrilled that I would definitely consider purchasing the MOTOBLUR software if it were available outside of Motorola and if I had a different Android phone.