Like a number of other Nextel handsets, the i1 features a sturdy design and meets Military Specifications 810f so it can withstand dust, shock, vibration, rain, humidity, fog, and more. To really drive home the idea of the phone’s ruggedness, Moto and Sprint invited Mike Rowe, host of Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs,” to introduce the Motorola i1. Rowe’s show takes a look at some of the toughest and dirtiest jobs in the nation; jobs in which people need rugged phones.

The phone indeed feels strong, and we’re thrilled to see an iDEN device that offers a sleeker design and such advanced features as a touch screen, a decent Web browser, and a 5-megapixel camera. Of course, we wish it was running something a little more than Android 1.5. That said, we also have to wonder, will the Motorola i1 be too much for the traditional Nextel customers?

The bad: Sluggish at times and spontaneously rebooted once during our review period; device is only running Android 1.5; small screen; keyboard’s durability in question since it’s exposed on the back.

The bottom line: The Motorola Backflip offers a unique design, but it’s rather lackluster in the features and performance department. It’s a decent choice if you’re upgrading from a feature phone, but anyone looking for speed and power should look elsewhere.

We can’t say this was a complete surprise, but AT&T made it official in February and introduced the Motorola Backflip as its first Google Android device. The Backflip made its grand debut at CES 2010, where we awarded the smartphone with our Best of CES award in the cell phones and smartphones category for its unique design, which includes a rear-facing QWERTY keyboard and a trackpad behind the display.

Unfortunately, after now spending some time with the device, this seems to be the only real highlight of the phone. The Backflip suffers from performance issues and runs Android 1.5, making it a rather disappointing Android debut for AT&T. It’s OK if you’re upgrading from a feature phone, but with four other Android devices expected in the coming months, we’d wait to see what else is out there.

Design

The most memorable thing about the Motorola Backflip is its design. You wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at the phone straight on, since it doesn’t have any notable traits. In fact, it largely resembles the Motorola Dext with a rectangular shape and rounded edges, but with a slightly smaller footprint at 108 x 53 x 15.3mm.

Unlike the Dext, however, the Backflip is a flip phone instead of a slider and this is where it gets interesting. When closed, the keyboard is actually located on the back of the phone, so when you swing it open, the keyboard sits right beneath the display. The layout makes sense and the hinge is strong but we just worry about the long-term durability of the keyboard. Though Motorola says the keyboard is rugged enough to withstand the exposure, we’re curious to see what condition the phone will be in after an extended amount of time placing it down on a surface or mixing and mingling with other objects, like keys, in a pants pocket or bag.

As far as the keyboard itself, we found it quite good. It’s spacious and the square buttons are a good size, minimizing mispresses, but we do wish they were a bit more domed like the Dext’s keyboard. The keys provide a nice springy feedback. The number and symbol keys (marked in blue) are doubled up with the letters (marked in white), and a nice, bright backlight makes it easy to see whether you’re in a dark room or outdoors. There are a handful of shortcuts along the bottom row and left side for quick access to the Web, search, messages, as well as to the home and menu screens. Also, tucked away into the corner of the keyboard is the camera lens and flash.

Flipping back to the front of the phone, you’ll find a 3.1-inch HVGA (320 x 480) capacitive touchscreen. It displays 256,000 colors, but lacks the vibrancy and sharpness of some of the other Android devices, such as the Motorola Milestone and Nexus One. The Backflip’s screen is also on the smaller size, so it’s a bit of strain on the eyes when viewing emails and Web pages.

There is no pinch-to-zoom support, but you can double-tap the screen to quickly zoom in on a point. The screen also has a built-in accelerometer that works in certain applications, such as the browser and maps, so you can get a wider picture in landscape mode. However, there can sometimes be a noticeable lag, including when you open and close the phone, and scrolling through lists stutters occasionally. The delays aren’t crippling but you also get the feeling that the Backflip is underpowered (see Performance for more).

That said, you don’t always have to rely on the touchscreen to navigate. Behind the display you will find what Moto calls the Backtrack navigation pad. It works just like a trackpad, letting you move between home screens and photos and scroll through lists and apps with the swipe of a finger. The idea is that using the Backtrack gives you an unobstructed view of the display, since your fingers are out of the way. Frankly, we don’t find this to be a huge issue; you swipe to your destination, tap to launch, and remove your hand. Done. That’s the whole purpose of having a touchscreen in the first place, right?

The Backtrack isn’t a bad idea. It works as advertised and at times it offers smoother scrolling experience. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really add a ton of value to the device. Part of the problem may be the location of the trackpad. Having it behind the display makes it a bit awkward to reach and use, but perhaps we just need more time with it. We definitely give Moto props for trying something different, but maybe it tried a bit too hard to be different.

Some final notes about the phone’s design: There’s a volume rocker, a micro-USB port, and a camera activation/capture button on the right side. On top, you will find the 3.5mm headphone jack and power/lock button, while below the display, there are touch-sensitive controls for the menu, home screen, and back button. The microSD expansion slot (supports up to 32GB cards) is located behind the battery door, which sits opposite to the Backtrack.

AT&T includes only the essentials in the sales package: An AC adapter, a USB cable, and reference material. One accessory you probably won’t have to get is a desktop dock. Opening the Backflip to a 90-degree angle sends the phone into media mode much like the Milestone when it’s docked into the multimedia station, so it will display the date and time, weather, and alarm clock. You can also launch a slideshow and have the Backflip act like a digital photo frame. For more add-ons, please check our cell phone accessories, ringtones, and home page.

Features

Similar to the Dext and the Motorola Devour, the Backflip uses Motoblur software, which helps merge contact information from various email accounts and social networking sites, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Exchange, Twitter, and Picasa, into a master list. In addition, emails (aside from Gmail) are combined into a universal in-box and appointments are also combined into one calendar.

To help you distinguish between accounts, a small icon is displayed next to each message indicating which account it came from and calendar entries are color-coded. We had no problems syncing up our Exchange (via Outlook Web Access), Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter accounts to the Backflip. Gmail messages arrived almost instantaneously, though appointments took a few minutes to show up on the phone. Outlook messages were retrieved every 15 minutes, just as we programmed it to do.

Motoblur goes beyond contact management, though. It also offers various widgets that can be added to the phone’s five home screens that show new status updates, messages, and other happenings. It’s definitely overwhelming at first, but once you learn to customize it to your needs, it can be a great resource. You can read more about Motoblur in our full review of the Motorola Dext.

Beyond Motoblur, the Backflip doesn’t hold many surprises in the features department. In fact, it’s a bit behind the times since it’s only running Android 1.5, so you’re not even getting some of the benefits of 1.6. Motorola said the Backflip will be upgradeable to Android 2.1 and supports over-the-air updates, but would not comment on release details at this time.

For now, you get all the Android staples–Android Webkit HTML browser, Android Market, Amazon MP3 Store, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Maps, and YouTube. Interestingly, the default search engine on the Backflip is Yahoo instead of Google, and from what we could see, there’s no way to change it back to Google. The QuickOffice suite allows you to view but not edit or create Microsoft Office documents.

As an AT&T phone, the Backflip also ships with a number of the carrier’s services and other extras, including AT&T Music and Video, AT&T Navigator, AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots, AllSport GPS, Yellow Pages Mobile, and Mobile Banking. In addition, to quad-band world roaming, the Backflip features voice dialing, a speakerphone, noise reduction technology, and 3G support. The Backflip is also outfitted with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and aGPS.

For more of an entry-level phone, we were pleasantly surprised to see that the Backflip was equipped with a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash. Unfortunately, some of that enthusiasm faded when we saw how it performed. Not only was picture quality a bit hazy and washed out, there was also quite a bit of lag when starting the camera, and it also caused the phone to spontaneously reboot at one point during our testing period.

Performance

We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; WCDMA 950/1900/2100) Motorola Backflip in New York using AT&T service and call quality was mixed. On our end, we enjoyed crisp, clear audio with no trace of background noise or voice distortion, and we had no problem using an airline’s voice-automated response system. Unfortunately, the same didn’t hold true for our callers, as they reported static on their end but only during lulls in the conversation. Surprisingly, the speakerphone provided even better sound quality on both sides of the conversation. There was no hollowness to the calls and voices sounded rich and full. Friends also praised the speakerphone audio for being pristine. Finally, we had no problems pairing the Backflip with the Logitech Mobile Traveller and Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones.

AT&T’s 3G network provided reliable and speedy coverage throughout Manhattan. CNET’s full site loaded in an impressive 19 seconds, while CNN and ESPN’s mobile sites loaded in 8 seconds and 7 seconds, respectively. YouTube and AT&T Videos buffered in just a couple of seconds. YouTube video quality varied, but clips from AT&T Video were almost unwatchable since the picture was so murky. We had better luck with an MPEG4 movie trailer, as the image was smooth and we nearly fell out of our chair after hearing the blaring audio. The Backflip has one of the most powerful speakers we’ve ever heard on a phone, and we’re not just talking volume. The sound is rich and full, not tinny, and it’s the same whether you’re listening through the phone or through a pair of headphones.

The Backflip is equipped with a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A processor and it just doesn’t have the stamina to keep up. The smartphone lagged and struggled at times with even the simplest tasks, such as switching screen orientation or merely pulling up an email. As we mentioned earlier, the camera app also crashed our phone. Though we’d like to see Android 2.1 on this device, we’re wondering if the Backflip can even handle it.

The Backflip ships with a 1,400mAh lithium-ion battery with a rated talk time of 6 hours and up to 13.5 days of standby time. We are still conducting our battery drain tests but will update this section as soon as we have final results. According to FCC radiation tests, the Backflip has a digital SAR rating of 1.37 watts per kilogram. 

Design

The most memorable thing about the Motorola Backflip is its design. You wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at the phone straight on, since it doesn’t have any notable traits. In fact, it largely resembles the Motorola Dext with a rectangular shape and rounded edges, but with a slightly smaller footprint at 108 x 53 x 15.3mm.

Unlike the Dext, however, the Backflip is a flip phone instead of a slider and this is where it gets interesting. When closed, the keyboard is actually located on the back of the phone, so when you swing it open, the keyboard sits right beneath the display. The layout makes sense and the hinge is strong but we just worry about the long-term durability of the keyboard. Though Motorola says the keyboard is rugged enough to withstand the exposure, we’re curious to see what condition the phone will be in after an extended amount of time placing it down on a surface or mixing and mingling with other objects, like keys, in a pants pocket or bag.

The Motorola Backflip features a unique flip design where the keyboard is located on the back.

As far as the keyboard itself, we found it quite good. It’s spacious and the square buttons are a good size, minimizing mispresses, but we do wish they were a bit more domed like the Dext’s keyboard. The keys provide a nice springy feedback. The number and symbol keys (marked in blue) are doubled up with the letters (marked in white), and a nice, bright backlight makes it easy to see whether you’re in a dark room or outdoors. There are a handful of shortcuts along the bottom row and left side for quick access to the Web, search, messages, as well as to the home and menu screens. Also, tucked away into the corner of the keyboard is the camera lens and flash.

Flipping back to the front of the phone, you’ll find a 3.1-inch HVGA (320 x 480) capacitive touchscreen. It displays 256,000 colors, but lacks the vibrancy and sharpness of some of the other Android devices, such as the Motorola Milestone and Nexus One. The Backflip’s screen is also on the smaller size, so it’s a bit of strain on the eyes when viewing emails and Web pages.

There is no pinch-to-zoom support, but you can double-tap the screen to quickly zoom in on a point. The screen also has a built-in accelerometer that works in certain applications, such as the browser and maps, so you can get a wider picture in landscape mode. However, there can sometimes be a noticeable lag, including when you open and close the phone, and scrolling through lists stutters occasionally. The delays aren’t crippling but you also get the feeling that the Backflip is underpowered (see Performance for more).

The Backtrack sits behind the display and acts as a trackpad. We’re not completely convinced of its usefulness.

That said, you don’t always have to rely on the touchscreen to navigate. Behind the display you will find what Moto calls the Backtrack navigation pad. It works just like a trackpad, letting you move between home screens and photos and scroll through lists and apps with the swipe of a finger. The idea is that using the Backtrack gives you an unobstructed view of the display, since your fingers are out of the way. Frankly, we don’t find this to be a huge issue; you swipe to your destination, tap to launch, and remove your hand. Done. That’s the whole purpose of having a touchscreen in the first place, right?

The Backtrack isn’t a bad idea. It works as advertised and at times it offers smoother scrolling experience. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really add a ton of value to the device. Part of the problem may be the location of the trackpad. Having it behind the display makes it a bit awkward to reach and use, but perhaps we just need more time with it. We definitely give Moto props for trying something different, but maybe it tried a bit too hard to be different.

Some final notes about the phone’s design: There’s a volume rocker, a micro-USB port, and a camera activation/capture button on the right side. On top, you will find the 3.5mm headphone jack and power/lock button, while below the display, there are touch-sensitive controls for the menu, home screen, and back button. The microSD expansion slot (supports up to 32GB cards) is located behind the battery door, which sits opposite to the Backtrack.

AT&T includes only the essentials in the sales package: An AC adapter, a USB cable, and reference material. One accessory you probably won’t have to get is a desktop dock. Opening the Backflip to a 90-degree angle sends the phone into media mode much like the Milestone when it’s docked into the multimedia station, so it will display the date and time, weather, and alarm clock. You can also launch a slideshow and have the Backflip act like a digital photo frame. For more add-ons, please check our cell phone accessories, ringtones, and home page.

Features

Similar to the Dext and the Motorola Devour, the Backflip uses Motoblur software, which helps merge contact information from various email accounts and social networking sites, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Exchange, Twitter, and Picasa, into a master list. In addition, emails (aside from Gmail) are combined into a universal in-box and appointments are also combined into one calendar.

To help you distinguish between accounts, a small icon is displayed next to each message indicating which account it came from and calendar entries are color-coded. We had no problems syncing up our Exchange (via Outlook Web Access), Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter accounts to the Backflip. Gmail messages arrived almost instantaneously, though appointments took a few minutes to show up on the phone. Outlook messages were retrieved every 15 minutes, just as we programmed it to do.

Motoblur’s software allows you to stream content, such as status updates and RSS newsfeeds, right to your home screen.

Motoblur goes beyond contact management, though. It also offers various widgets that can be added to the phone’s five home screens that show new status updates, messages, and other happenings. It’s definitely overwhelming at first, but once you learn to customize it to your needs, it can be a great resource. You can read more about Motoblur in our full review of the Motorola Dext.

Beyond Motoblur, the Backflip doesn’t hold many surprises in the features department. In fact, it’s a bit behind the times since it’s only running Android 1.5, so you’re not even getting some of the benefits of 1.6. Motorola said the Backflip will be upgradeable to Android 2.1 and supports over-the-air updates, but would not comment on release details at this time.

For now, you get all the Android staples–Android Webkit HTML browser, Android Market, Amazon MP3 Store, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Maps, and YouTube. Interestingly, the default search engine on the Backflip is Yahoo instead of Google, and from what we could see, there’s no way to change it back to Google. The QuickOffice suite allows you to view but not edit or create Microsoft Office documents.

As an AT&T phone, the Backflip also ships with a number of the carrier’s services and other extras, including AT&T Music and Video, AT&T Navigator, AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots, AllSport GPS, Yellow Pages Mobile, and Mobile Banking. In addition, to quad-band world roaming, the Backflip features voice dialing, a speakerphone, noise reduction technology, and 3G support. The Backflip is also outfitted with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and aGPS.

Picture quality wasn’t all that great, and the camera app is quite sluggish.

For more of an entry-level phone, we were pleasantly surprised to see that the Backflip was equipped with a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash. Unfortunately, some of that enthusiasm faded when we saw how it performed. Not only was picture quality a bit hazy and washed out, there was also quite a bit of lag when starting the camera, and it also caused the phone to spontaneously reboot at one point during our testing period.

Performance

We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; WCDMA 950/1900/2100) Motorola Backflip in New York using AT&T service and call quality was mixed. On our end, we enjoyed crisp, clear audio with no trace of background noise or voice distortion, and we had no problem using an airline’s voice-automated response system. Unfortunately, the same didn’t hold true for our callers, as they reported static on their end but only during lulls in the conversation. Surprisingly, the speakerphone provided even better sound quality on both sides of the conversation. There was no hollowness to the calls and voices sounded rich and full. Friends also praised the speakerphone audio for being pristine. Finally, we had no problems pairing the Backflip with the Logitech Mobile Traveller and Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones.

AT&T’s 3G network provided reliable and speedy coverage throughout Manhattan. CNET’s full site loaded in an impressive 19 seconds, while CNN and ESPN’s mobile sites loaded in 8 seconds and 7 seconds, respectively. YouTube and AT&T Videos buffered in just a couple of seconds. YouTube video quality varied, but clips from AT&T Video were almost unwatchable since the picture was so murky. We had better luck with an MPEG4 movie trailer, as the image was smooth and we nearly fell out of our chair after hearing the blaring audio. The Backflip has one of the most powerful speakers we’ve ever heard on a phone, and we’re not just talking volume. The sound is rich and full, not tinny, and it’s the same whether you’re listening through the phone or through a pair of headphones.

The Backflip is equipped with a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A processor and it just doesn’t have the stamina to keep up. The smartphone lagged and struggled at times with even the simplest tasks, such as switching screen orientation or merely pulling up an email. As we mentioned earlier, the camera app also crashed our phone. Though we’d like to see Android 2.1 on this device, we’re wondering if the Backflip can even handle it.

The Backflip ships with a 1,400mAh lithium-ion battery with a rated talk time of 6 hours and up to 13.5 days of standby time. We are still conducting our battery drain tests but will update this section as soon as we have final results. According to FCC radiation tests, the Backflip has a digital SAR rating of 1.37 watts per kilogram.

I’ve been using the Nexus One with TMobile since mid-December as my primary mobile phone. This is the best Android powered phone to date. It’s also the fastest and most elegant smartphone on the market today, solidly beating the iPhone in most ways. In this rapidly evolving market there is sure to be something better just around the corner. But if you are looking to buy a high end smartphone right now, this is the phone for you. The Nexus One is the Android signature device.

Our complete review is below.

Nexus One: The Big Picture

The phone looks more like the iPhone than any other phone on the market. There is no physical keyboard like the Android-powered Motorola Droid, and the tradeoff is a much slimmer design. The phone is 11.5 mm deep, slightly thinner than the iPhone 3GS at 12.3 mm. It is also slightly lighter than the iPhone 130 grams v. 135 grams). The package comes with the phone, a removable battery, 4 GB Micro SD storage card (expandable to 32 GB), USB charger and microphone headset.

The Nexus one has four functional touch buttons at the bottom of the screen (back, menu, home, search) and a navigation trackball pointing device. It also has physical power and volume controls. But most of your interaction with the phone will be through the gorgeous 3.7 inch 480 x 800 OLED capacitive touchscreen. This is the best mobile phone display on the market today, blowing away the iPhone’s 480 x 320 display. The screen is bright and alive, and an absolute pleasure to use.

This phone is also powered by the Snapdragon 1 GHz core processor, which is more than able to handle the Nexus One’s 3D graphics, multiple applications running in the background and heavy browser use simultaneously. Unlike previous Android phones, there is no slowdown or lag when you push the phone’s performance, and less of a need to kill applications to keep the device humming.

On the downside: all this hardware bling is an energy hog. The screen will self adjust brightness and Google is smart about turning down the processor when it’s not being used. But I’ve found battery life to be woefully brief, even by iPhone standards. Officially the phone has up to 7 hours talk time, 250 hours standby, 5 hours of 3G Internet use, 7 hours of video playback and 20 hours of audio playback. Unofficially, I was able to kill the fully charged battery with 1.5 hours of continuous gameplay (Robo Defense) on the full-brightness screen. Be prepared to keep this phone near a charger at all times. You can easily view what’s using the battery, though (the screen is 71% of my current usage), and then adjust the hardware or software usage to maximize battery life.

Overall the Android is a superior mobile device, particularly when paired with Google Voice. Google is calling this the first of the Super Phones. And they may not be exaggerating all that much.

Price And Availability

The Nexus One is available “in large quantities” starting today at Google.com/phone. An unlocked GSM version of the phone that will work in most countries is $529.

Google is also offering a subsidized version of the phone – also unlocked – through T-Mobile for $179. The service plan offered by Google is 500 minutes/unlimited SMS/unlimited data for $80/month. T-Mobile’s termination fee is $200, and some users might be tempted to buy the T-Mobile version and terminate immediately, paying just $379 for the unlocked phone. Google says that users terminating too soon will be charged the full price of the phone, however. But even the T-Mobile version of the phone can be used overseas on trips by slipping in a different SIM.

Google will ship the unlocked version of the phone to customers in the U.S., U.K., Hong Kong and Singapore. In the Spring they say they’ll add a CDMA version of the phone through Verizon, and set up a European store with a carrier plan via Vodafone.

U.S. users can also use the unlocked phone with AT&T, although the phone’s radio isn’t able to use AT&T’s 3G network.

Notable Software Features

The Nexus One, which runs the new Android 2.1, has a number of notable software features that make the phone a pleasure to use.

First, Google Voice is deeply integrated with the phone, as it is with all Android phones. That means you can assign your Google Voice number to the phone, and use it to make all outbound calls and text messages. In my opinion this is the single biggest selling point for Android phones, and why I won’t switch away from the platform any time soon.

Google’s Voice Keyboard is amazing. It goes way beyond the Voice Search application that was launched in 2009. Every text field in the device is now voice enabled. In most apps you can choose the microphone button and talk into the phone, which then converts your speech to text. I’ve found it to be around 90% accurate with no background noise (dropping to around 70% accuracy in a moving car). It’s easy to then go in and edit out errors. It’s a massive time-saving feature of the phone.

The Live Wallpaper feature is pure eye candy, and fun. You can choose a variety of wallpaper settings like Grass (blades of grass wave gently in front of a day or night sky), Magic Smoke (my favorite, draws smoke, clouds, water and plasmas in eye popping colors), Water (touch it and it ripples), and a Polar Clock (presents the date and time as clockwise arcs).

The new clock application, which runs automatically in the charger doc, shows the time, local weather and has easy access buttons to the alarm, pictures and music. Keep a charger next to your bed and toss out that alarm clock.

Google will also offer a Settings Backup service that backs up profile, application, ringtone and other settings to the cloud. Setting up a new Android phone after using the backup service is a breeze. Even without it I was able to set up the phone in about ten minutes with my Google contact, calendar, email and important applications.

Finally, Google has added a lot of nice graphical touches, including 3D scrolling of apps, and a new way of viewing photos using the CoolIris technology. Photos dip into the plane as it there is depth. Tipping the phone trips the accelerometer and the photos dip in the same way.

Notable Hardware Features

The most obvious hardware feature of the phone is the 480 x 800 OLED capacitive touch screen. Combined with the Snapdragon chipset the phone is a real workhorse. But Google has also included other more-than-nice touches.

The noise cancellation feature is particularly useful. The device has a second microphone on the back that monitors inbound noise and automatically cancels it out (anyone who’s used Bose noise cancellation headphones on a long flight will appreciate this). It does a great job of canceling out machinery and wind noise on the other end of the call. In my testing, call recipients noticed a substantial increase in call quality on this phone v. either the Droid of the iPhone. Look for other phones to quickly add this feature, it’s a must have.

On the downside, the phone’s primary microphone is located on the bottom of the device, to the left. I noticed that on calls, when I cradle the phone between my neck and shoulder without using my hand, my voice is often muted and can’t be heard. This is a design error that should be changed in future versions.

The phone’s camera really shines. It has a large footprint on the back of the device, larger than on most phones. It’s a 5 megapixel camera with a flash, but that description doesn’t do it justice. The macro and low light features are top notch for a mobile phone. I took the picture to the right in low light with no flash in our conference room at TechCrunch HQ.

The phone has two available docks. Both charge the device via frictionless touch points. The normal charger turns on the phone’s clock feature, as described above. The car charger turns on Google Navigation, a killer Android application that turns the phone into a connected navigation device.

Google, Purveyor Of The Nexus One Smartphone

The Nexus One is an important milestone in the smartphone market. This is a software company, frustrated with making compromises with hardware manufacturers, that has taken the product bull by the horns. HTC makes the phone, but the branding is mostly Google and it’s clear that they directed every aspect of the development of this phone. It’s Google’s vision of the perfect Android device, from the huge and beautiful screen and massively fast Snapdragon processor to the software elegance of Google Navigation, Live Wallpaper and the Voice Keyboard. When combined with Google Voice there is no phone on the market today that can touch the Nexus One.

Unlike previous Android phones, and I’ve used most of them, the Nexus One has no obvious flaws or compromises. The phone is the state of the art in mobile, and I will use it happily. Until, as I always say, something better comes along.

It’s this simple: If you don’t buy an iPhone, buy a Droid.

It’s the best phone on Verizon, and with Android 2.0, the second best smartphone you can buy, period. It’s flawed, deeply in some ways. But it’s the second best phone around, on the best network around.

Droid is a champion of possibilities: for Motorola, for Verizon, for Android 2.0. It exists to show you what each of them can really do. You can kind of think of it like a Super G1, laying out what it means to be an Android 2.0 phone, with powerful new processors and delicious new displays with sky-high resolutions. If Droid is merely the first in a new wave, we have a lot to be excited about.
The Shiny New OS
The main attraction for Droid is Android 2.0, the remarkably updated mobile OS from Google. It’s so important, it gets its own review. After all, you will start to see it on other phones soon. It’s what makes Droid so great—new navigation app, new contacts/social network syncing, better email management, better browser—but also why Droid still falls short of the iPhone, particularly when it comes to managing music and video. If there’s something you don’t see here, chances are we discussed it in the earlier piece—if you care about the phone, you’re gonna want to read the full software review too.
Design and Build
It didn’t hit me until last weekend why Droid’s design struck such an emotional chord with me. Was it the functionalist, industrial masculinity, expressed perfectly through glass and metal and unapologetic angles, in a powerful phone that’s remarkably streamlined? It’s all of that, yes. But it’s also the fact that aesthetic is rendered black and gold metal accents, which is why it taps into something deep and profoundly affective from my childhood:
It’s practically cheating. I can’t not love the design of this phone.
Oh, That Screen
Droid’s 3.7-inch, 854×480 display with an eye-popping pixel density of 267ppi, is the kind of screen you ache for. An analogy: Do you remember how amazing you thought Nintendo 64 games looked, ten years ago? Have you looked at them lately? Do you remember the sinking feeling you got, realizing just how ugly they are now? That’s how’ll you’ll feel looking at every other phone with the now-standard 480×320 screens we thought were so gorgeous a couple of years ago. They’re lo-fi and lifeless by comparison.

It’s the clarity of the text that captivates. It’s true, there’ve been Windows phones with excellent screens that have the same resolution as Droid, but the font rendering has always been too weak to take advantage of them. Reading ebooks on an iPhone has always given me a headache (so I don’t), but with Droid’s pixel density, I could read on it for hours. It’s that good. The color’s fantastic, too, though not Zune HD OLED level.

Touch response is mostly effective. When there are misfires, like getting no response when you flick your finger to pull out the app menu, it’s hard to tell if it’s the phone or the software—at least until more Android 2.0 phones are out there. But no serious complaints.
Keyboard and Strange Buttons
The keyboard is okay. I liked it a lot more on Day 1 than I do today, and that’s because I never got any faster. The problem is that the key landscape is too flat and homogenous—a necessary sacrifice for Droid’s remarkable skinniness—so there’s simply no way to feel out precisely what key your thumb’s on, meaning I never broke out of having to stare at the keyboard while typing. I found the actual layout to be excellent. Overall, the keyboard works, but you’ll probably never fly on it. I’m faster on the landscape touch keyboard, personally.

The d-pad’s not as dandy as a trackball for getting around, but for navigating around text, it’s better than I expected—despite its puniness, I never pressed the wrong button.

But I hate the four soft touch buttons on the front of the phone. For one, there are no dedicated phone or end call buttons, so if you accidentally call somebody at 4am, you have to figure out how to end the call exclusively via the software interface. For two, the lack of feedback is annoying, especially if you’re holding down the search button trying to activate voice search and it’s not coming up. Did you miss the button? Are you pressing it wrong? Who knows? If Android’s going to rely hard on these four buttons, the way iPhone relies on the home button, they need to be actual physical objects.
This Camera Sucks
The camera is complete garbage. It takes 10 years to start up, 2 to focus, and another 4 to actually take the goddamn picture. And there’s no distinct visual feedback to let you know a photo’s been snapped. And the photos suck. That pumpkin shot, in decent lighting, is as good as it gets. Like I said in the Android 2.0 review, I don’t know if it’s the hardware or the software, but it’s inexcusably bad. (Update: Here’s a couple of more shots from the camera. You can compare the indoors one with the much better Sprint Hero sample shot seen here, since they were taken in the same place.)
Performance
Droid’s brain is a potent ARM Cortex A8 TI OMAP 3430—it’s basically the same as the chips inside of the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS. Like I said in the Android 2.0 review, while it runs apps and multitasks with gusto, basic things like menus and the desktop stutter way too often. It’s like driving a Ferrari with a door that groans loudly every time you open it.
Battery Life
With moderate to heavy usage—browsing, some navigation, push Gmail, moderate app usage, with the occasional app running in the background—I managed to make it through a full 8-12 hour day before recharging, each day for about a week, though some days were closer than others. Your mileage will vary, depending on how many apps you’ve got running in the background and how much you hit GPS, but my experience was that it was entirely acceptable for a modern smartphone.
Nuts, Bolts and Stability
Verizon’s network is top notch, and being able to actually use the internet on my phone with impunity in New York is revelatory. In both New York and Seattle testing, reception has been excellent, though around Pittsburgh, it was spottier than expected. Voice quality was pretty excellent whenever we didn’t use Google Voice.

While definitely stable enough to use as an everyday phone, we did run into a few bugs: GPS accuracy was wildly off-target on more than one occasion, pinpointing our location hundreds of miles away, and the only way to fix it was to reboot the phone (I assume that’s a software issue, not a hardware one). We also had one complete crash after finishing a phone call that required a reboot. And more apps stopped responding more often than we were used to on previous versions of Android, requiring a force close.
Hello, Moto
These things are true about Droid: The camera’s not great; the keyboard isn’t mindblowing; Android 2.0 lacks the polish and multimedia prowess to completely match the iPhone. What’s also true is that a killer design, Google’s services, Android’s exploding app ecosytem, powerful multitasking, a stunning screen and Verizon’s network still make it the second best phone you can buy right now, after the iPhone.

At the same time, there’s reason to pause. Android is evolving more rapidly than any other smartphone platform, both in terms of the hardware and software. When HTC’s Hero came out, it crushed every other Android phone out there. Just a couple short months later, Droid is on top. In four months, we’ll probably see a new champion. That Droid sets such a high bar for everything after might be the best thing about it.

When a once leading—now last place —smartphone maker dumps Windows Mobile and goes Android, it’s an all or nothing decision. Who knew that this could save the company?

The Motorola Cliq is the Android OS on Motorola hardware. Like Palm before it, Motorola decided that Windows Mobile 6.5/7 would be too little, too late to combat the iPhone menace. But instead of going in house and creating something from scratch, Motorola decided to take an already stable OS and build social networking features directly into the interface. So yes, it’s basically an Android phone; but it’s an Android phone++.

Motorola’s Cliq delivers on its social networking promise quite admirably, even if there are a few design quirks that prevent the experience from being perfect. And although it’s a little sluggish on the hardware side—as sluggish as any of the other Android phones out there now, that is—the fact that it has a good physical keyboard and solid Motorola hardware behind it makes the Cliq a very interesting contender in the Android world.

The Hardware is solid, except when it’s not
Moto is no stranger to building its own phones, so you’d expect some smart hardware know-how to go into Cliq’s design. That’s only kinda true. Everything on the phone is where you’d expect it to be and buttons are more-or-less in acceptable locations, but there’s a looseness in the slide-out keyboard that’s more irritating the more I play with it. I can’t tell if it’s because the slider doesn’t quite lock into place like it should—there’s a little give in both the open and closed positions—but the “Oreo-ing” is really distracting. It’s not as if the screen portion will pop off, it’s just an annoying looseness in the phone that makes you feel like they didn’t quite solve the puzzle of fitting everything in place.

A hardware keyboard is always a welcome thing to have, and the Cliq’s behaves well. There’s enough spacing in each of the keys that it’s easy to type, but not too much that it’s occupying a lot of space. There could have been some better arrangement of symbol keys (the underscore is buried under a symbols menu), but that’s just being nitpicky. Overall, it’s a solid keyboard that’s quick to enter data with.
Other build quirks
The wobbliness of the slider means that you need to grip only the bottom (keyboard) part of the phone when you’re taking a photo, or else the screen will slide open and you’ll probably drop your phone. Also, Motorola decided to make the power switch flush with the right side of the phone so even Daredevil would have a hard time finding it by touch. Since the power button also lets you toggle Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, airplane mode and GPS, that’s a bad design.

You have to open up the battery cover to shove an up-to 32GB microSD card in there, but since you’ll rarely replace that (use a microUSB to transfer files), it’s not a huge deal. I do like the fact that there’s no cover on the microSD slot, as well as the presence of the now-obligatory vibrate toggle on the left side of the phone. Its 3.5mm headphone jack being located directly on the top of the phone kinda screws up the lines a bit, but I’d rather a slightly uglier phone than not having a 3.5mm jack.
Power and battery
Because the Cliq runs the same processor as the current Android phones now—like the Hero and the MyTouch 3G—there’s not a whole lot of performance difference between the devices. They’re all kinda slow. Not unusably slow, but transitions and animations don’t pop immediately. And this sluggishness might be part of the reason why interacting with the touchscreen isn’t as fluid a process as it could be, and why sometimes when you’re swiping between emails or tweets, the page will pop back into place and you have to swipe a second time.

As for the battery life, you can pretty much imagine how much use you’ll get out of an always-connected device that gets pushed emails, tweets and Facebook updates all day. Even if you don’t make a lot of calls, you’ll have to charge the device every night. And if you do do a lot of texting and emailing and calling and tweeting, you’d better get an external charger.

The main drain seems to be both the push and the fact that you’re using the phone a lot to keep up with everything that’s happening on your social networks. Motorola built a double-edged sword on that one; people want to use it a lot for checking status updates, but in turn the 1420 mAh battery runs out in less than a day.

Hardware features we like
There are a couple nice touches that we’re appreciative of, such as the blinking light on the front for notifications, which has been on BlackBerries for a while. Great if you don’t get a lot of emails or if you don’t follow a lot of people. You can also wake up the phone using the facebuttons, not just the power toggle, so two quick menu button presses will get you to the home screen immediately.

Having a D pad is going to be useful in the future when Android developers start making games that take advantage of it, but you can use it now in NES/SNES emulators. And the camera is a beefy 5-megapixel autofocus, which produces decent photos compared to other Android phones. Plus, call quality is pretty good, something Motorola has managed to do well even when their software has faltered.

Software
Seeing as Android has been available for more than a while, and everyone should be familiar with what it does, I’m going to focus on the Cliq-specific sections. Suffice it to say that it can do everything other Android phones can, including downloading OTA Amazon MP3s and accessing all the apps in the Marketplace. The most important of Motorola’s additions are the home screen widgets, so we’ll start there.

The home screen widgets
The four widgets of note are the status widget, the messaging widget, the happenings widget and the news/RSS widget. The news widget is self-explanatory, and really cool that a phone would have a built-in RSS reader right on the home screen, but the others are a little bit trickier. The status widget lets you update your “status” to any of your social networking sites, like Facebook or Twitter. The messages widget consolidates ALL your 1:1 messaging, like emails, SMS, DMs on Twitter or private messages on Facebook. The happenings is a feed of other people’s status updates on your social networks.

Messaging Widget

I don’t know why, but it’s very satisfying to be able to swipe through your emails directly from the home screen, quickly deleting or replying with just one tap. The problem comes from the way it’s implemented and the lack of screen space, because you can’t see the recipients list to see if you’re the only person address to in an email, nor can you do a reply all if there are multiple people. And it doesn’t tell you if you have an attachment.

Basically it’s just a small window to your email, and you’ll have to actually open up the traditional email app to do any communication beyond the basics. And there’s also a full-blown Messaging APP, which consolidates all your accounts like the widget does.

Happenings Widget

This is where your all your social networks are rolled into one big feed. Again, it’s a time saver to have all these updates in one place and being able to swipe through them, though sometimes you get way too many updates to realistically do so. What we would like is if there was an option to customize which networks displayed in the widget, so we could, say, have only Twitter and leave out Facebook. Right now it’s an all or nothing affair, and you have to go into the Happenings app to see everything in list form and to be able to view only one network at a time.

The widget does allow you to directly interact and respond to people’s updates, so you can comment on people’s walls or do an @reply to someone’s tweet. All you have to do is start typing in a particular section and some menu option will pop up, prompting you with context-specific actions you can do.

News Widget

The RSS widget behaves pretty much the same way as the previous two, allowing you to swipe through news items like you would in a standard RSS reader. Motorola was kind enough to bundle a few types of RSS feeds together, and Gizmodo is part of the Technology one. Good choice dudes.

Nice touches
By avoiding the creation of an entire operation system from scratch, the Motorola engineers had time on their hands to really think about the user experience, and it definitely shows in all these small touches and shortcuts they put in.

• There are some slick transition animations when you open up widgets and apps, which are quick enough to not be distracting, but slow enough to distract you for a second while your program is loading

• Faces are fetched and attached to your contacts automatically, and you can choose whether you want to grab the images from Google or Facebook. This way you can always have some kind of picture for a person when they call you for easy recognition

• The MotoBlur account you have to create on setup backs up some of your settings so that you can re-load it in the event of phone theft

• Speaking of phone stealing, there’s a free service online that’s similar to MobileMe that you can use to locate your phone from the web

• There’s a five panel home screen. Eh? Ehh??

• The call button got moved to a soft button, eliminating the need for two hard buttons on the outside of the phone. You also get a contacts button instead of a end call button, since you don’t need to hang up if you’re not in a call.

• There’s visual voicemail

• People’s faces everywhere, and you can see their latest status updates when a call is initiated

• You can manually link contacts together, like on Palm’s webOS, in case the phone doesn’t automatically recognize that Frucci is the same Adam Frucci you have in your Gmail

• A self help widget is there when you get the phone, walking you through a few features you might not see

• There are shortcuts everywhere, which would usually be a bad thing since you have to poke around to find them, but they’re implemented in such a way that it actually makes sense

• You can type on the home screen to find a contact. This makes sense in the Moto Cliq world since the Cliq is a person-centric device, whereas on other phones it would make more sense to bring up a Google search instead

• And typing in the applications tray searches through your apps

Gripes
The software’s not flawless, however, and you will run into some minor annoyances even with all the niceties.

• Yahoo Mail only works over 3G, not Wi-Fi. This most likely has to do with some deal or legal restriction, but it doesn’t make the decision less annoying. If we had to choose between Yahoo only on 3G and no Yahoo, we’d pick the 3G

• There isn’t really desktop syncing for your contacts or calendar. You can send movies and music and photos over the microUSB connection, but Motorola really wants you to put your contacts on either Gmail or a social network and pull them down that way

You don’t get a lot of fine-grained control over accounts. (Yes, I made you wait this long for a pun on the top photo.) For example, you can’t tell your phone to only pull down contacts from Gmail and not Facebook, or choose to display only your Twitter and MySpace contacts at once. It’s basically all or just one. More account customizability would be the number one software target we’d ask Motorola’s team to aim for, and something we’re eager to see in Blur version 1.5.

The Whole Experience
Like we said in the hardware section, the major thing holding back the Cliq from being a fantastic phone is the processor. The animations are smooth, the UI touches are smart and the social networking stuff is useful; we just wish we could have a bit more account customization, do all of that on faster hardware. Once Motorola gets the Blur platform onto a more powerful phone and works through some of the software quirks we noticed, they’re going to have a really good Android phone on their hands.

Is this the phone that Motorola needs to bring it back into the smartphone race? It could be. They were smart enough to know that just doing another Android phone wasn’t enough in itself, so they pulled together and created all this social networking glue to bind the experience together. It’s cohesive enough to call the Cliq a different experience from other, similar devices like the Sprint HTC Hero, and is a pretty damn good first step in a possible Motorola comeback. [Motorola]

Social networking features are quite good

Lots of little touches that improve on the base Android platform

Hardware keyboard

Decent hardware except for the Oreo-like keyboard action

It’s an Android phone at heart, which means you’ll either like it or dislike it, based on how you feel about the platform

A slow-ish CPU makes the experience weaker than it could be

Palm and Motorola have taken very different paths to get where they are today; one began life as a scrappy Valley start-up founded by a tablet computing pioneer, the other traces its roots to all the way back to the early days of consumer electronics and the automotive industry. Yet somehow, through years (decades, even) of adventure, success, and misfortune, they’ve found themselves in exactly the same situation here in 2009: it’s do-or-die time. Palm, of course, has elected to try its hand at resurrecting the very thing that took it to superstardom in the first place — an elegant, tightly-controlled software platform of its own with hardware to match — while Motorola has thrown virtually all of its remaining weight behind Android in the hope that it can catch a little mojo from Google’s ecosystem.

For Motorola, it’s the wireless equivalent of stepping up to the roulette table, putting what’s left of your depleted life savings on red, and letting it ride just as you see security guards off in the distance coming to throw you — penniless — off the premises. It’s a gamble of the highest order, but it’s also a gamble Motorola’s painfully aware that it needs to take. North America’s only top-five handset manufacturer needs nothing less than magic (and a little luck) to earn its way back into the world’s wireless elite — and that risky play starts right here, today, with the CLIQ / DEXT.

So does the CLIQ pave the way to a New Motorola, or did the RAZR’s checkered legacy ultimately dig a hole too deep to escape? Read on.

Packaging

An exciting product often starts with exciting (or at least interesting) packaging, a trend that has been particularly dominant in the wireless and wireless accessory industries the past couple years. From the iPhone’s minimalist surrounds, to the Pre’s angled white and orange box, to the Touch Diamond’s geometric oddity, to the Jawbone’s gravity-defying pedestal, companies seemingly invest as much research and engineering into shelf appeal and the customer’s unboxing experience as they do into the device itself. The CLIQ’s no different in this regard, and Moto has actually managed to do something pretty unique here with a locking mechanism that keeps the red inner box from sliding out of the sleeve until you press both sides of the sleeve inwards. We were skeptical when we first looked at it — the half-circles on the sleeve imploring us to “press to open” just confused us more than anything else — but it actually works quite well, and it’s reusable. You won’t tear anything apart getting it open for the first time.

Hardware

Once you get past the fantastical experience of opening the box, you’re immediately presented with the CLIQ itself resting atop a cardboard cradle. Even though this phone represents the first volley of a wholly, genuinely reinvented Motorola, there’s something… well, still very recognizably “Motorola” about the industrial design, and whether that’s a good or a bad thing is largely a matter of personal opinion. For one thing, that means that virtually every part of the phone looks and feels over-engineered, which leaves you with a device that’s both heavier and bulkier than it realistically had to be. For us, that wasn’t a problem — it generally gave the phone a substantial, reassuring, high-quality feel — but for fans of tight jeans or svelte, sexy handsets, it’s important to remember that the CLIQ clocks in over a millimeter thicker than the keyboardless myTouch 3G. That sounds like an insignificant difference, but between the added weight and girth, we found that the CLIQ was much more noticeable in a pocket (both to you and to people who happen to be glancing at your pocket for whatever reason).

The slider on the CLIQ is definitely rock solid. While we felt a tiny bit of give on screen presses when the phone is closed, generally the two-piece device still feels like a connected whole. Sliding open the keyboard produces an enthusiastic “chunk” sound, while it snaps back in place with a reassuring tightness. Compared to other slider phones of this ilk, it’s a major step up.

That brings us to the phone’s inevitable parallels to the HTC Dream / T-Mobile G1. The G1 has a special place in our hearts as the very first Android device to reach retail — and it’s held its ground admirably over the past year as the only QWERTY slider for Android to launch anywhere in the world — but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s aging rapidly, thanks in particular to anemic internal storage (the only place Android allows apps to be installed) and a balky, plasticky design that always suited all-out geeks better than it did a mainstream audience. The CLIQ definitely steps up to the plate here, ditching the wacky arc-shaped screen opening mechanism for a traditional slide, losing the angled chin, and generally upping the quality of materials throughout the phone — but the keyboard is another story.

The CLIQ’s keys are heavily domed to maximize the odds of finding the one you’re looking for and the oversized Enter key is a welcome touch, but we wouldn’t say the overall design is a slam dunk over the G1’s; we suspect some folks will still prefer its rubber keys (the CLIQ’s are hard plastic), generous key separation, and less extreme clickiness. The biggest issue with the CLIQ’s keyboard, though, is the placement of the spacebar, Alt, Symbol, Search, and back keys. Unlike the rest of the pad, that bottom row is concave rather than convex, meaning they’re essentially buried beneath the edge of the device. We can’t count the number of times we hit V instead of the spacebar — just missing it outright due to its low clearance. We recognize that Motorola had to do something about the sliding mechanism, but it makes typing on the phone twice as difficult. It’s just bad design. The CLIQ also suffers from a spacebar that’s no bigger than the special use keys around it, making it harder to find in a hurry — we would’ve gladly traded normal-sized Alt and Sym keys for a spacebar three or four letter keys wide (or, maybe even better, two spacebars along the bottom).

We suspect the CLIQ’s d-pad philosophy is primed to stir a little controversy, too. Unlike the G1, the CLIQ lacks any directional control other than the touchscreen itself when the phone is closed; opening it reveals a left-aligned four-way pad with a select button in the center. Granted, the presence of a d-pad on a device like this is technically redundant, but the counter-argument is that putting an optical touchpad or recessed trackball in place of the CLIQ’s Home button would’ve taken no additional space — and realistically, it wouldn’t be high enough when the keyboard’s open to make it inconvenient to use, which means you could ditch the d-pad on the keyboard altogether and make the letter keys larger (or add additional columns of keys for, say, more frequently-used symbols). It’s certainly not a big deal — we never use the trackball on our myTouch anyhow — but some Android veterans may struggle with the change.

Speaking of the Home button, a quick tour of the CLIQ’s auxiliary controls and connectors reveals the usual fare — plus a couple surprises. Directly below the screen, you’ve got the aforementioned Home button in a stylized red circle (just so it’s extra hard to miss, we suppose) with a Menu button to the left and a Back button to the right. Bear in mind that these aren’t Google-standardized icons for representing Android commands, and we actually had a hard time figuring out what the Menu button was before we pressed it — but obviously, this is a one-time inconvenience before the button’s function is committed to your brain and you never have to worry about it again.

On the right side you’ve got a two-detent camera button (which means you can autofocus before committing to taking a picture, just as you would with a regular camera) and a dedicated standby key that serves to lock the phone, toggle power, and bring up a menu of radios to toggle on and off if held long enough. The button is flush and can be difficult to find without cheating and looking, but we suppose that’s by design — it’s not the kind of button you want to be hitting frequently on accident. Up top you’ve got the 3.5mm headphone jack (a big win over the G1, but something we expect to see on virtually all smartphones going forward) and on the right, we’ve got three goodies: a volume rocker, micro-USB port, and a Treo / Pre / iPhone-style mute switch, a welcome touch that makes it a whole lot easier to swiftly silence your phone. On the myTouch or G1, if you locked your display you’d need to log in just to make that happen, and frequent meeting-goers know just how frustrating that can be after, say, the third powwow of the day.

There’s a catch with the CLIQ’s silent mode, though: the vibrator is straight-up loud. We’re not sure if it has to do with the weight of the phone’s two halves, the materials being used, the size and power of the actual vibrator, or if there’s some slop in the slider that’s causing the halves to really bang up against one another, but depending on the surface that the CLIQ rests on, silent mode can end up being just as loud (if not louder) than when the ringer’s on. The upside to this, we suppose, is that it makes it a little easier to feel calls and messages when it’s in your pocket, but buyers should beware that full, vibrator-free silent mode is probably going to be warranted from time to time depending on the situation.

Moving around back, Motorola’s put a pleasing amount of work making sure that you (and the people around you) won’t get bored looking at what’s usually perceived as the least-interesting side of a phone. The two variants of the CLIQ — titanium and white — each have unique battery panels, a three-dimensional wave pattern and a series of randomly-placed circular indentations respectively. We really like both, though we wish they were soft-touch plastic — hard plastic always feels cheaper and makes a phone just a little less slip-resistant, and with the wave pattern pressing into your hand every time you hold it, you’re constantly noticing that it’s there. We think it’s one of just a few hardware slip-ups that detract from an otherwise premium-feeling device.

Lighting on the CLIQ is a mixed bag. The most prominent lit feature, of course, has to be the large Motorola logo (well, technically a MOTOBLUR logo on account of the “blur” bubble to the right of it) that’s mounted in the middle of the metal area behind the display that’s only visible when the keyboard is open. It sounds gaudy, ridiculous, and unnecessary, but it’s actually quite awesome. One of our favorite features of the entire device, actually. It’s not overdone, it’s tasteful, and for the phone’s owner… well, you never have to see it anyway since you’re looking at the other side of the display. In terms of cool factor, the keyboard’s backlighting finishes a close second: it’s actually got two independent backlights, one that illuminates the primary keys and a second that lights the secondary options only when the Alt key is pressed. In low-light situations, it definitely makes the keyboard a less-intimidating ordeal since you’re effectively looking at half of the options most of the time.

What we didn’t like as much was the alert lighting, which is unfortunate on a device as socially connected as this where there’s a good chance that you’re literally getting new communication (in one form or another) literally by the minute. The phone’s only alert light is a pinhole-sized white “breathing light” — to borrow a common Nokia term — that can only be set on or off to signal the arrival of new notifications (regardless of what they might be). The myTouch doesn’t offer much more configurability here, but we do like the fact that HTC’s device at least lets you distinguish between an email and a missed call or text message by featuring a blinking LED up top paired with a breathing light in the trackball. We think that the CLIQ — particularly with BLUR — could’ve used at least two independently-controlled lights, because like many users, we found that we were getting enough emails to render the light meaningless. It basically became The Boy Who Cried Wolf for us within a few minutes and we found ourselves ignoring it.

Current G1 and myTouch owners should be happy to hear about the bump up to a 5 megapixel camera, though we had mixed results; focus seemed a bit soft at times and the apparent lack of a (or at least unpredictable) macro mode made close focus impossible altogether. The second shot here is a 1:1 crop — with no digital zoom — taken with normal indoor incandescent lighting; the focus indicator suggested that we’d locked on the keyboard, but even if you take motion blur out of the equation here, it still isn’t a nice, crisp focus by a long shot. The good news is that camera issues like this have a tendency to be corrected in firmware, so we’re hoping this gets addressed — it’s no Nokia Nseries for raw picture quality, but we’re not writing it off just yet.

Motorolas have a longstanding reputation for being able to pull even the weakest signals, but we’re sad to say the rule doesn’t really apply here — everywhere we went, the CLIQ essentially matched the myTouch and switched from 3G to EDGE (and back) in the same areas. We’d hoped for another bar or so on average, but if you live, work, and play in areas with decent T-Mobile reception, you’ll be fine here.

The screen can only be characterized as the strangest capacitive screen we’ve ever used, because it feels… well, resistive. We found it usable but perhaps the balkiest of any Android phone to date, giving the user plenty of motivation to slide open the keyboard rather than trying to deal with the virtual one. Although it’s nothing more than a reskinned version of the default Cupcake keyboard, it was basically impossible to use without injecting enough mistakes to make it more trouble than it was worth — a problem we haven’t had (at least not to this extent) on the myTouch. The issues might be exacerbated by the fact that the CLIQ features a display slightly smaller than the G1 and myTouch, coming in at 3.1 inches — just a tenth of an inch smaller in diagonal than HTC’s models, but it does make a noticeable difference. Strangely, there’s enough bezel around the screen so that Moto could’ve easily slipped in a larger component (in our totally non-technical opinion, anyhow), so it may have been nothing more than a cost-saving move. Hard to say.

Both the earpiece and speakerphone on the CLIQ are loud and clear, we’ve got no complaints there — and the phone has an absolutely critical feature that the myTouch and G1 both lack: an honest-to-goodness proximity sensor. The display faithfully disengages when you’re on a call and you hold the phone to your face, springing back to life when you pull it away. It sounds like a luxury at first, but any Pre or iPhone user can tell you how important it is the moment you need to enter a digit while on a call or switch audio sources — on the myTouch, for instance, it’s a minimum of two steps just to get to a dial pad once you’re connected, and showing the dial pad can be excruciatingly slow depending on how laggy your phone is at the moment. In fact, we might be crazy, but for heavy voice users who want to be on Android, the proximity sensor could very well be a selling point in itself.

Of course, the CLIQ isn’t just about Motorola making an Android phone for the first time — it’s as much (if not more) about the socially-connected skin that the company has grafted on top of the whole package, MOTOBLUR. In a nutshell, MOTOBLUR is Motorola’s version of Palm’s Synergy — an independent set of servers that Motorola owns that memorizes all of your email and social networking accounts, keeps them linked together, and lets you communicate in a blended way across services. In theory, it’s a great idea; everyone’s got a Facebook page and a Twitter account, countless contacts distributed among several disjoint repositories, and no cohesive way to manage it all from a central location, which is the problem that MOTOBLUR tries to solve in your pocket.

Like Synergy’s Palm Profile, MOTOBLUR requires its own account that you’re prompted to set up the first time you turn on the CLIQ, and you’re walked through the process step-by-step. It’s easy and quick, and once you do this, you’ll get a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that your account information and linkings will be transferred to any MOTOBLUR-equipped device you happen to own in the future. Afterwards, you’re invited to add supported account types, a list that currently includes MySpace, Facebook, Google (obviously), last.fm, Twitter, Picasa, Photobucket, and Yahoo Mail, plus separate entries for generic POP / IMAP email and Exchange ActiveSync (which Motorola bills as “Corporate Sync”). It’s a pretty impressive list and should cover 90 percent of the average user’s social networking and email needs, but there’s a problem: we’re being told that BLUR is a closed platform. There’s no API that would allow third-party developers to add account types into this mix, and as far as we can tell, Motorola doesn’t intend to add one — BLUR is being billed as “the special sauce” that Moto owns and controls completely. We don’t really get that approach — the best thing Moto could do would be to open this up and garner support from anyone it can, but for the moment anyway, that’s not the strategy they’re subscribing to. On the flipside, Moto also says that it could add new services into BLUR very quickly and easily, but again, it shouldn’t necessarily be at their sole discretion to do so — let third-party developers add as much value as they can, we say. There’s nothing Motorola needs more right now than a vibrant ecosystem that it can call its own.

The next thing that’ll happen after you’ve added your account information is the CLIQ will start syncing your contacts — and we mean all your contacts. All of them. And there’s no way to stop it from happening. Every Twitter follow, every Facebook friend will suddenly be a mere touch away on your phone. This is the same issue we had with the Pre, and Motorola seems to have learned nothing from Palm’s mistake. Whether or not this is an intentional decision or technical hurdle that couldn’t be bypassed, it’s annoying; we simply don’t need quick access to Barack Obama from our phone (don’t get us wrong, we wish we did, but we think we’re at least several rungs below Yankee White security clearance). The good news is that you can create your own contact subgroups, though setting them up could quickly devolve into tedium when you’re getting the phone going for the first time. The contact manager also has a bar across the top that lets you filter by source — Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so on — but by default, you see all of them. Basically, we think it can be a little overwhelming, leaving a new user asking “why would I want to see all of these people when I’m just trying to make a call?” Indeed, BLUR — and the concept of managing everyone you know on your phone, regardless of social medium — has a ramp-up phase that we’re not sure everyone’s going to want to bother with.

Once you get past the initial account setup, you’re presented with a very busy home screen — far busier than anything you see out of the box on a so-called “Google Experience” Android device. This is the very essence of BLUR, a place where everything that everyone in your universe says to you sort of collides into a giant pile. For folks who feel the need to be ultra-connected (that is, beyond the mere email and voice that most of us old-timers consider to constitute “ultra-connected”) at all hours of the day and night, this is certainly one way to make it happen. The BLUR-based home screen experience is powered by a handful of widgets that can be configured and repositioned just as you would any others; the big ones are Status, Messages, and Happenings, while News and Weather don’t really tie in to the functionality but still get BLUR branding as a part of Motorola’s value-add.

First up, the Status widget has three main lots in life: letting you know what your most recent social networking status update was, gently reminding you to update your status if you haven’t recently, and giving you an easy way to update. You can update synchronously across all your accounts or update individual ones (Twitter alone, for example, which we imagine will be a frequent use case). It’s a simple widget and it does its job admirably. Messages, meanwhile, aggregates all forms of communication that are directly to you — SMS messages and Twitter direct messages, for example. A snip of the most recent unread message is displayed on the widget itself along with the sender’s avatar — a possible privacy concern for some — but the bigger problem here might be that the widget doesn’t show so-called “@ replies” in Twitter, just direct messages. Motorola’s justification here is that @ replies are public, therefore belong in the Happenings widget (which we’ll get to momentarily), but the fact is that you want to see them — they’re directed at you, after all — and none of the widgets here make it easy to do that.

Finally that brings us to the Happenings widget, which is a mishmash of all of the noise your follows, friends, frienemies, and acquaintances are making around the networks. Aggregation is often good, it really is — but it doesn’t take a lot of noise to effectively render the widget useless with an endless stream of status updates. Happenings has two core problems. The first is that your main navigation only lets you see one message per screen, and it requires a horizontal finger swipe to move to the next message; after reading ten or maybe fifteen updates about your BFF’s bar crawl, your thumb’s tired and you’re ready to give up. If you’ve got, say, a couple hundred Twitter follows (a conservative figure by many users’ standards) and, say, fifty or a hundred Facebook friends, you can see how this gets out of control really fast. The good news is that you can click on the widget’s header to get bumped out to a proper scrollable list of updates, but by the time you’ve done that, you’ve already started to defeat the purpose of displaying this information as a quick, glanceable widget. The second issue, and what we consider to be a more serious drawback — is that fact that those aforementioned @ replies from Twitter are pushed into your main stream of updates here, with no way to see messages directed towards you. If you follow more than 10 people, it’s all but impossible to see who’s trying to strike up a conversation. This is one of the most basic functions of almost every Twitter app available, and yet Motorola failed to include it with the CLIQ. It’s as if the people who designed the software don’t actually use the service.

All of the widgets get updated through Motorola’s BLUR servers — not from the many places across the interwebs where the data originates — which has its pros and cons. Motorola’s big argument here in the affirmative is that its servers periodically aggregate information and push it down to the phone, rather than the phone polling a bunch of sites periodically, stemming battery drain. Given the CLIQ’s already heavy drain, that’s a good thing (and we’ve definitely seen Twidroid plow through a G1 in just a few hours with the polling interval cranked). The downside, though, is that you’re not getting anything in real time. For random Twitter noise, no biggie, but generally speaking, you’d like to be clued into direct messages posthaste. It gives the supposedly ultra-connected home screen an air of staleness much of the time.

The CLIQ will launch with Android 1.5 (that’s Cupcake, if you recall), and that may emerge as one of the CLIQ’s biggest weaknesses: as a custom-skinned phone, updating the kernel is a far more intricate procedure for Motorola and T-Mobile than it is with a bone-stock Google Experience device like the myTouch. There’s a reason the carrier was able to push Android 1.6 (Donut) to the G1 and myTouch so quickly after Google made it available, and we wouldn’t expect that same kind of good fortune with the CLIQ and other MOTOBLUR-based devices in the future. All of Moto’s customizations need to be ported — which may or may not be a lot of work depending on what’s changed in the trunk, but it’s still work either way — and then they’ve got to be validated both by Motorola and the carrier before getting pushed out. Fortunately, the CLIQ supports over-the-air updates, but this is still all assuming Moto ends up updating the CLIQ to 1.6 or any core release beyond that; no announcement has been made at this point.

As for overall device performance, don’t expect miracles. At our first demos at Mobilize in September, we were pleasantly surprised by what we saw; UI components that we’d grown accustomed to seeing lag on the Magic (and early-firmware Heros) were snappy and smooth. Thing is, these were fresh devices that we didn’t have an opportunity to bog down with endless accounts, emails, picture messages, and background apps — and in reality, the fact that you’re still running a 528MHz MSM7201A core here ends up catching up to you in the course of daily use. We found that it can take upwards of a second or longer for BLUR widgets to load after tapping in certain circumstances, most of which are realistically beyond the average user’s control — there’s just too much stuff running in the background, and you can’t expect Joe Sixpack to be killing tasks. The app drawer and browser both get jerky over time, too. Ironically, much of this seems better in 1.6, which as we said before, hasn’t landed on the CLIQ so far. At any rate, Snapdragon, we eagerly await your arrival to take this platform to the next level.

Wrap-up

Let’s be very clear: though it fares pretty competitively against the aging crop of Google-powered devices on the market today, the CLIQ isn’t the Android phone to end all Android phones. Then again, it’s not supposed to be — at least, we hope it isn’t — because a smallish HVGA display and an overworked, outmatched MSM7201A core aren’t going to win any believers that haven’t already been won over by HTC’s stable. What the CLIQ does do, though, is lay the groundwork for something better — a Motorola that doesn’t cause eyes to roll, a Motorola that makes aspirational phones that people can want to own again.

In a perfect world, Moto would’ve kicked off its Last Stand by coming to the plate with an absolute beast of a phone — massive processor, massive camera, massive display, the works — but market realities and carrier demands have meant the middling CLIQ and DEXT are the first to get time in the spotlight. We think this is just the beginning, though; hardware will inevitably improve, and BLUR — a system that is currently right in principle and wrong in execution — will evolve to become a much more usable platform. How do we know? We don’t — but this is a humbled company with its back firmly pressed against the wall. They’ll adapt and succeed, or they’ll die. It’s really that simple.

In the meantime, would we recommend the CLIQ? Against a G1, yes, if for no other reason than the fact that you’re getting more internal memory and a more robust, modern, un-weird hardware design. In the bigger picture, though, we’d keep our wallets in our pockets for the time being — the CLIQ looks and feels like a testbed, not quite ready for primetime but a genuinely heartening sign that Moto’s still got a pulse.

Another way of putting it? Allow us to draw an analogy that’s particularly appropriate in light of Motorola’s situation: you might say the CLIQ is the DynaTAC. We’re holding out for the MicroTAC and StarTAC.

It is no surprise to see the Tattoo coming from HTC: they have a history of producing various formats of Windows Mobile devices so are ideally placed to repeat this operation for Android. The HTC Tattoo, then, follows the inoffensive design lines of preceding HTC touch devices and at first glance could easily be taken as a Windows Phone.

Although it is an entry-level or “mass market” device, the build quality is still good. Plastics are used throughout, but they are free from creaks and it looks smart. A range of custom covers will be available with the option of designing your own through tattoomyhtc.com; ours simply had an Android popping his head out of the back cover, the cuddly little chap that he is. The HTC Tattoo measures 106 x 55.2 x 14 mm, so is relatively compact.

The front sees the usual range of controls: Home, Menu, Back and Search sit paired on two rocker keys under the screen, with a central four-way/ok controller flanked by the calling keys. The action on the buttons is reasonable, if a little shallow, although those with bigger hands might find that bending your thumb to use them is a little uncomfortable.

The locations are reasonable too but you’ll probably find in one-handed use that reaching the extreme left or right key (Home and Search respectively), depending on which hand you are holding the phone in, is difficult. The four-way controller might not actually get much use, but can slide through the HTC Sense homepages or up and down menus as you see fit without touching the screen, perhaps overcoming some of the niggles with screen responsiveness.

The left-hand side of the phone sees a volume rocker. The top of the phone gives you the 3.5mm headphone jack and around the back is the 3.2-megapixel camera, sans flash. On the bottom is the bespoke USB connection, which we have found will accept a standard Mini-USB in absence of the supplied cable.

The screen is the area where the HTC Tattoo really differentiates itself from the HTC Hero and other Android devices released so far. The HTC Tattoo comes with Android 1.6 (Donut) which supports a wider range of screen resolutions than previous versions, which is where HTC really save the money in this model.

The screen is a 2.8-inch QVGA 240 x 320 pixel resolution display and it is resistive – quite a drop down from the impressive screen found on the HTC Hero. The operating system, Android with HTC Sense sitting on top, is essentially the same but the experience is quite different.

Being a resistive display means that you lose the multi-touch support that gives the Hero such a good browsing experience. It also means that general navigation of the user interface loses the precision and immediacy that the best devices have. It means you’ll spend more time poking the screen to elicit a response and scrolling isn’t as accurate as you’d like it to be.

That said, Android and HTC Sense have been well designed for touch control, so this isn’t a throwback to the bad old days of Windows Mobile: it still all works as it should, with HTC Sense binding together the Android experience.

We won’t go into detail in HTC Sense here, but if you haven’t heard about it, we’ll run through the highlights. You get five homepages and the ability to flick left and right through them. They can be customised to your liking, adding HTC widgets for major applications like weather, email, Twitter, etc as well as Android widgets or shortcuts to people, applications, bookmarks and so on.

You also get Scenes, so if you want a different homepage selection for work, home, travel or whatever, you can do so. Android already pulls on your Google account for calendars, email and contacts, but Sense takes it a step further, giving you the option to pull in Facebook and Flickr too. It links Facebook and Google contacts, giving you a rich contacts experience, with easy access to an individuals updates, photos and so on. It doesn’t go quite as far as Motorola’s Motoblur, but as a front end to a phone, we can only say that HTC Sense is the way modern mobile phone should be.

You still get those Sense quirks that don’t quite work, like arriving at a “live” widget and finding it isn’t updated, so you have to then wait for the refresh before you get the current information, but the same is true of the Hero. You’ll also get the occasional pause on opening your more information-intensive apps, but nothing devastating.

But the biggest thing you’ll notice is the step down in quality that dropping to QVGA resolution brings. The screen isn’t as sharp as we’d quite like and the smaller size means less space for widgets overall. It also means that you’ll need to view text larger for it to be clear enough to read.

However, if you haven’t been living with a higher resolution device, then this isn’t something that will really bother you and it competes with other compact smartphones, bringing with it both the customisation advantages of the Android platform and the friendly and fun HTC Sense.

But not so fast. As this is a Donut (Android 1.6) device with a lower resolution, there is a marked difference in the Marketplace too. For those that don’t know, the Android Marketplace is where you go to pick up applications. The combination of Donut and QVGA mean that at present not all the apps are available yet. Developers have to recompile their app for 1.6 (which shouldn’t be a problem) as well as make any changes to the user interface to it works with the screen. It’s a process that will take time, but at the time of writing, most of our favourites have not yet made an appearance.

The Browser is good, but really misses multi-touch. It is fast enough, but you are dependent on double tap zooming or zoom buttons at the bottom the screen. The low resolution also means that you need to zoom a lot, because you can’t read the text.

The smaller size and resistive screen also have an impact on the keyboard experience. You get HTC’s keyboard with suggestions, which will smooth out the majority of spelling mistakes, but if you have big fingers, even the landscape QWERTY can be a little small. One advantage though, is that if you have fingernails/false nails (girls, I’m talking to you) you’ll be able to bash out messages using the tips of your nails, something that the Hero won’t let you do.

The hardware specs are comprehensive however. You get HSPDA, you get Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well as an FM radio, a commuter favourite. You also get lots of sensory awareness including GPS, accelerometer and a digital compass, so as far as smartphones go it ticks all the right boxes.

To expand the memory there is microSD card slot hiding under the back cover, which you’ll need to store all those pics, videos and music that the Tattoo is waiting to take on. Battery life is fairly average for a connected touch device, giving you about 5 and a half hours of talk time and 20 days on standby. In practise, once you start drawing on all that data you’ll be charging it every night.

Verdict

Overall the HTC Tattoo experience is a good one. Sure, it is a noticeable step down from the Hero and rightly so. You don’t get the same touch response and it doesn’t look as sharp as the Hero. The keyboard experience isn’t as good (with a caveat on long nails) and the browser doesn’t have the same natural experience without multi-touch.

But you don’t lose out on the spec sheet, meaning that you’ll still be able to take advantage of all the smartphone goodness you are looking for with all the Android customisation to make the phone your own, once the Marketplace catches up. The icing on the cake is HTC Sense, which we love.

If you are looking for an affordable and friendly entry to the Android world then the HTC Tattoo is worthy of consideration, but if you can stretch to the Hero, you’ll get so much more out of it.

The bad: Small 2.8-inch QVGA display; narrow buttons for portrait-mode onscreen QWERTY keypad; many Android apps not suited for lower-resolution panel; poor speakerphone.

The bottom line: If you want an affordable Android smartphone, the Tattoo will fit the bill. Power users should look elsewhere.

The HTC Tattoo is the fourth Android device from the Taiwanese company. That’s quite a feat considering many phone-makers committed to the platform have not even released a single product. The Tattoo has one feature that sets it apart as an entry-level smartphone–a resistive 2.8-inch QVGA display. Let’s see how this smaller, lower-resolution screen (compared with the 3-inch and larger HVGA panels) performs coupled with Google’s mobile operating system.

Design

The Tattoo’s 106 x 55.2 x 14mm dimensions and 113g weight make it a compact and light device. The device is solidly built and we like how the rounded edges give it a nice feel in the hands.

Like most full-touchscreen devices, the front of the Tattoo is taken up mainly by the screen. This is a 2.8-inch QVGA LCD, similar to what you find in many older Windows Mobile smartphones. During our use, we found it sufficiently bright and sharp for reading text. Images also displayed nicely. Unfortunately, those who have used devices like the iPhone or HTC Magic, which come with HVGA (480 x 320) screens, may find the halved resolution on the Tattoo lacking. This can be felt mainly when browsing the Internet and trying to type with your fingertips. More on that later when we discuss this smartphone’s features.

You get the standard set of buttons for an Android phone. Aside from the Call and End keys, there are dedicated Home, Menu, Back and Search buttons under the display. A round directional pad is also found there which we felt worked well, thanks to its large circumference and prominent select button. The sides of the Tattoo are bare aside from a volume rocker on the left.
Connectors on this smartphone include a mini-USB for charging and syncing on the base and a 3.5mm audio port on the top. This means you can use your favorite pair of headphones for music playback, a feature that will please those particular about earphone audio fidelity. Memory expansion is possible through a microSD card slot found on the left side under the back battery cover.
With the Tattoo, HTC has provided a way for users to personalize the chassis of the phone. Every single part of the external plastic shell is replaceable. You do that first by removing the battery cover, and from there, the front face plate and back base plate can be pried off completely. The company has partnered with gadget accessory company Garskin to sell replacement shells. The patterns are quite varied and you can even design your own from the Garskin Web site. HTC is giving users a redemption card in the standard sales package which entitles you to one free phone cover. If you want to buy more, they cost US$24.90 each.

Features

Though the Tattoo is supposed to be a budget Android handset, HTC has put a lot of features in this upcoming mobile phone. It comes with HSDPA and Wi-Fi for high-speed data, Bluetooth and GPS for navigation. Powering the phone is a Qualcomm 528MHz processor found in many other high-end HTC phones, too, so that’s good news for this entry-level handset.

One thing we really liked about the Hero, HTC’s last Android device, was the Sense UI interface. This custom software comes with many useful widgets and integration of social-networking services into the contacts. The Tattoo will also sport Sense UI so many of those features will appear on this handset. One widget we did find missing was the Stock app–HTC probably assumed that those using the Tattoo aren’t interested in the stock market.

Back to the matter of the 2.8-inch QVGA screen, it wasn’t perfect, but it was better than we expected. For starters, HTC did a good job scaling down all its widgets to fit this screen, so the seven scrollable displays on the Home page can be well-utilized. For example, the People widget (which shows your favorite contacts so you can access them quickly) has contacts’ photos that are noticeably lower in resolution compared with the Hero’s implementation, but we could still make out the faces.

We did run into some problems with the browser. The small screen meant reading text required zooming into the page. This led to more scrolling just to read a news article or wiki. There was also some frustration when trying to tap on small links. In these cases, we ended up using our fingernails to do the job. This was possible because the LCD is resistive, not capacitive (which requires a fingertip skin contact) like other Android phones.

Somewhat frustrating as well was the onscreen QWERTY keyboard. Keys were really narrow, so typing with the tips of our thumbs became near impossible unless one held the device in landscape mode or had pointy fingernails.
Another consequence of the QVGA screen on the Tattoo is that fewer apps appear on the Android Market. Only programs which developers have tweaked to support multiple resolutions (introduced in Android 1.6) will be available for download. Though we didn’t count exactly how many there are, some of our favorite games were not available. The excellent Twitter app Twidroid had not been ported over as well, last we checked.
A 3.2-megapixel camera is found on the back of the Tattoo. Remember, this is an entry-level handset so there’s no autofocus or LED flash. It produced decent pictures though–just don’t expect too much of it.

Performance

We were impressed with the battery performance of the Tattoo. With background data and Gmail syncing turned on, we got 2.5 days of use on a single charge. This included Web surfing on HSDPA and some phone usage and texting. GPS navigation worked well with Google Maps but we don’t recommend trying to use it for in-car navigation because of the small screen.

Voice quality was good and we didn’t experience any dropped calls during our period of use. One thing that did poorly was the volume of the speakerphone. It was way too soft to be useful unless you were in a quiet room.

Conclusion

For an entry-level smartphone, the Tattoo met our expectations. It does everything you expect an Android device to do, and has great battery life to boot. The screen is a little small, but usable for the most part. Those with large fingers should really try it out at a store before deciding if they can live with the text input.

If you are someone who wants maximum mileage with your Android device, we advise spending a bit more for either the HTC Magic or Hero. This is mainly because developers have designed their apps mostly for HVGA screens for the Android Market.

But for those looking for a capable smartphone on a budget, the Tattoo is a great choice. In fact, we liked it more than the Touch2 (recently reviewed here) which goes for a similar price. The compromises made in the Tattoo are acceptable considering the cost. We don’t recommend paying the full S$598 (US$431) retail price, but anything under S$200 (US$144) with a basic operator plan would be a fair deal for this Android smartphone.

The Magic, also known as the G2, lacks the slide out QWERTY keyboard of the original Dream, instead featuring an onscreen virtual keyboard, courtesy of the pre-installed Android 1.5 “Cupcake” software update. The virtual keyboard is one of the best we’ve used on a smartphone and is certainly on par with the iPhone.

Hold the Magic in your hand and you’re immediately impressed by the responsiveness of both the touchscreen and the trackball compared to most other smartphones. The menus are also responsive thanks to the lack of fancy eye candy.

As for the onscreen keyboard, the Magic’s virtual keys are roughly the same size as those on the iPhone but there’s less spacing between them – due to the fact the Magic features a 3.2 inch touchscreen display compared to 3.5 inches on Apple’s wunderphone (both offering 320×480 resolution). Thankfully, as with the iPhone, you’re assisted by excellent auto correction which allows you to type quite quickly on the Magic without worrying too much about hitting the correct key (unlike phones such as the LG Arena which force you to stop and accept every correction). A slight vibration offers physical feedback as you press each virtual key.

Shedding the keyboard gives the Magic a slim and attractive look compared to the functional-but-frumpy Dream.

The sleek Magic would be equally at home in a boardroom or a cafe, being 7 mm narrower than the iPhone and weighing 17g less, which helps it sit better in your hand.

Under your thumb is a Blackberry-esque trackball, as with the Dream, but the Magic adds a dedicated search button to sit amongst the Call, End, Back, Home and Menu buttons. The search button generally calls up a Google search box, but also searches within applications such as contacts, email, Google Maps and Android Market.

You’ll still find volume buttons on the left edge of the phone, but the dedicated camera button on the right has been lost in favour of pressing the trackball in order to capture a shot – which is still preferable to tapping the screen.

The Magic’s onscreen keyboard makes it much more user-friendly than the Dream, because you no longer have to go through the motions of turning the phone and sliding out the keyboard every time you want to enter the tiniest bit of text. The virtual keyboard will also switch to landscape mode if you turn the phone on its side. Of course the 1.5 “Cupcake” update is coming to the Dream as well, which will then offer the best of both worlds — except for its chunky form factor.

Keyboard aside, the Magic’s hardware specs are almost identical to the Dream. You’ve got the same processor, the same screen and the same 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera. You need to remove the back of the phone to get at the microSD card slot, but thankfully it’s not underneath the battery. HTC has still stuck with its lame USB audio out, which means forced USB-to-headphone adaptor accessory purchase, rather than a 3.5mm audio jack but, at the Australian HTC Magic launch, journalists were assured that a 3.5mm jack is coming on future devices.

When it comes to connectivity, the Magic boasts 802.11b/g wifi, Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR and GPS for using with applications such as Google Maps. Unfortunately the Magic still only offers 7.2 Mbps HSDPA on the 900 and 2100 MHz bands – which is acceptable considering it’s available from Vodafone and Three, but this is useless for Telstra’s 850MHz network. If you switch to Telstra, you’ll be stuck on 100 kbps-ish 2G EDGE speeds, and you won’t benefit from the vast coverage of Next G. On the other hand, if you switch to Optus in the future, you’ll get their expanded regional 3G reception, which is claimed to cover 97% of the Australian population now.

Criticism over the Dream’s poor battery life has been addressed by boosting the Magic’s battery capacity by almost 20 percent to 1340 mAh, and the Cupcake software update also slurps less power, thus offering improved battery life.

Just to confuse things, there are slight differences between the “HTC Magic with Google” available from Vodafone and the “HTC Magic” available from Three. Only the the Vodafone model is designed to receive over-the-air software updates, while the Three model must be updated via a PC. Meanwhile the Three model features more RAM (288MB compared to 192MB) and A2DP Bluetooth stereo, as well as a pre-installed Exchange email client and smart dialler. Such applications can be added to the Vodafone model via the Android Market apps store. Access to an apps store means you can customise the phone to meet your needs.

The combination of Android 1.5, Android Market and the Magic’s large, responsive touchscreen offers a worthy successor to the Dream. It also offers a tempting alternative for those who crave the iPhone’s useability but are put off by Apple’s heavy-handed restrictions on features.

THE BAD: The Google Ion lacks full Outlook-syncing support and a standard 3.5-millimeter headset jack. Video quality is uneven and the HTML browser interface could be refined. Camera-editing and personal-organizer options are slim, and the landscape keyboard isn’t available in all applications.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The Google Ion is the Android device for which we’ve been waiting. A few complaints remain, but its eye-catching design and interface, improved features, and satisfying performance make us excited about Android’s full potential.

Android Phone: HTC Magic Photo

Ever since we first heard of the HTC Magic, we’ve been waiting on the edges of our seats for it to land at T-Mobile. After all, the Magic would be our second Android phone for review and we were eager to see if Google and HTC could improve upon their initial T-Mobile G1. Our curiosity peaked after a T-Mobile-ready Magic cleared the FCC two months ago, but hope turned to impatience as the weeks dragged on. Instead of being the “Year of Android,” 2009 was turning out to be frustratingly quiet.

But just as we were about to give up, a device called the Google Ion made the rounds at the Google I/O Conference. Essentially a Magic with slight cosmetic tweaks, the Google Ion shares most of the G1’s features and adds the Android 1.5 “cupcake” update. The Ion won’t be released into the wild as a mass market device, but we decided to give it a shakedown anyway, since it came equipped for T-Mobile’s 3G service. And we’re very glad that we did.

Rest assured that the Ion is an attractive smartphone with a load of features and an intuitive interface. Sleek where the G1 was clunky, the Ion improves immeasurably on its G1 predecessor. In all seriousness, it should have been the original Android device. We still have a few complaints, and some users may miss a physical keyboard, but the result is a powerful handset that can rival the iPhone on many fronts.

Design

The Google Ion is quite unlike HTC’s earlier G1, and that’s a good thing. While the G1 was rather large to accommodate its physical keyboard, the touch-screen-only Ion sports a sleek profile, glossy skin, and an eye-catching blue-and-black color scheme. It’s an appealing device in all regards and we’re glad to see an Android phone that actually looks cutting edge. At 4.65 inches tall by 2.19 inches wide by 0.65 inch deep and weighing 4.09 ounces, the Ion has a sturdy, comfortable feel and it slips cleanly into a pocket or bag for easy traveling.

The Ion’s real estate is dominated by a gorgeous 3.2-inch touch screen. The bright 480×320-pixel HVGA display shows colors, graphics, and photos beautifully; it also offers a customizable brightness setting and an adjustable backlighting time. You can personalize the screen with a selection of wallpapers.

The user interface is similar to the G1’s, which means it is fun, clean, and intuitive. Compared with the iPhone, you have to crawl through a few menu pages, but it takes only a few minutes to know what goes where. And once you understand it, you shouldn’t have to look at the user manual again. The home screen is made of three panels side by side, which you can move between by swiping your finger across the display. In a bold degree of customization, you can populate the screen with any number of shortcut icons that give instant access to the related applications. The Ion comes with a selection of default icons, but you can remove them or add more as you wish. Such customization and ease-of-use makes for one of the best cell phone UI’s around.

On the whole, the touch interface is responsive. We could move through long lists easily by flicking our finger (to go quickly) or by dragging it up and down the screen (to go more slowly). We could also scroll around Web pages with relative ease. Just be advised that, like the G1, the Ion doesn’t have an iPhone-like multitouch interface that lets you zoom in by pinching your fingers. Also, while the Ion has an accelerometer, it doesn’t work in every feature (see below).

The display offers haptic feedback, but only for certain actions. For example, a quick tap to open an application won’t offer any feedback, but you will feel a very slight vibration if you press and hold (aka a “long press”). On the G1, a long press when inside an application would bring up a menu window with pertinent commands for that feature. The Ion, however, has a physical Menu key that performs that function. Yet, like the G1, you use a long press to drag icons around the display. Be advised that the Ion has a capacitive touch screen, so you must use your finger; a stylus or your fingernail won’t work.

The main menu page is simple and intuitive.

Like on the G1, a tab at the bottom of the display will pull up the main menu, with the full set of features and application icons. It’s an easy-to-use and attractive arrangement that’s free of burdensome animation or graphics. You can scroll up and down by dragging your finger. Some features take a bit of digging, but enough options are surfaced up front. To close the menu, just press the tab again. At the top of the home screen is a dedicated Google Search bar. Pressing it once will open a full keyboard, though it’s available only in vertical mode. Next to the search bar is a small microphone that opens a voice search feature.

We like the Ion’s physical navigation controls.

Below the display are the Ion’s only physical controls. They offer improvements over the G1 not only because there are more of them, but also because they have a sturdier feel. You’ll find Talk and End/power keys, a Home button, the aforementioned Menu control, a Google Search shortcut key, and a back button. The keys are crammed into a relatively small area, but they didn’t feel too cramped. We also like that the navigation trackball is larger and has more space around its perimeter. Pressing the trackball straight on selects icons and menu options.

The phone dialer interface is simple and intuitive. To reach it, you can press the Call button or you can go through the main menu. Round onscreen buttons show both numbers and the related letters. They were sufficiently large, but haptic feedback would be nice.

The virtual keyboard differs according to which feature you’re using. As previously noted, the Google Search keyboard is available only in the phone’s vertical mode. Though it should be fine for quick taps, the arrangement is rather crowded when banging out long messages. Indeed, we made quite a few mistakes when tapping. Fortunately, the messaging, e-mail, and browser applications both offer a landscape keyboard with a lot more room. To change between portrait and landscape keyboards, just tip the phone to the left and the Ion’s accelerometer will do the trick. You won’t get the same effect when tipping the phone to the right, but that’s a quirk we can overlook. You can switch between alphabetic and numeric/symbol keyboards with a single tap.

We still don’t get a standard headset jack on the Ion.

The volume rocker is located on the Ion’s left spine. It’s thinner than we’d like, but it’s easy to find when you’re on a call. The microSD card slot is located behind the battery cover. Fortunately, you don’t have to remove the battery, too. Like the G1, you’re forced to use a single Micro-USB port on the bottom of the handset for the charger, USB cable, and any wired headset. While it’s not an issue for the first two peripherals, it is annoying that you can’t use a standard 3.5-millimeter headset without the included adapter. Sure, many users will, no doubt, use a Bluetooth headset instead, but it’s nice to have the option to use both.

Features

Each contact in the Ion’s phone book holds eight phone numbers, four e-mail addresses, an IM handle, a postal address, a company/organization name, and notes. You can save callers to groups and assign one of 52 polyphonic ringtones (including one called “Romancing the Tone”–ack). You’ll be able to store an additional 250 names on the SIM card.

The Ion offers many of the same features as the G1. We won’t go into details here, but we’ll list them for review purposes. For a more in-depth look, see our G1 review. Essentials include a calculator, an alarm clock, a calendar, text and multimedia messaging, and speaker-independent voice dialing. A few more organizer apps like a world clock and a to-do list would be nice, but they should be available as apps. And, of course, you can sync Google calendar and contacts.

More demanding users will like the presence of a YouTube app, Wi-Fi, USB mass storage and syncing, GPS with Google Maps integration, and Google Talk. The Ion’s music player isn’t terribly fancy; it offers album art, but features are limited to playlists, shuffle, repeat and an airplane mode. You can load your own music on the Ion or you can buy music from the Amazon MP3 store.

The Android Marketplace, which lets you download free and paid apps, is unchanged. We browsed through it a bit and again found it to be quick and easy to use. One quirk of the Android OS is that you can store applications on the internal memory only. On the Ion, that’s limited to 288MG RAM and 512MB ROM, so it’s important that you track your available storage carefully. The handset offers a memory card slot–a 2GB MicroSD card came with our review model–but you’ll have to save it for photos, music and other files.

Thanks to the Cupcake 1.5 update, the Ion offers stereo Bluetooth and autopairing, video recording and video playback. We knocked the G1 for lacking those options, so we’re glad to see them here. The stereo Bluetooth pairing worked without a hitch and the video recorder, while devoid of editing options, is intuitive (see Performance). You can choose from two quality formats.

Other Cupcake additions include bundled widgets on the home screen, video uploads to YouTube, photo upload to Picassa, one-touch access to a contact card from call log event, copy and paste in the Web browser, the capability to use pictures in your favorite contacts menu, search within a Web page, a tabbed Bookmarks interface, a user dictionary for custom words, and a few user interface tweaks. We’ll delve more into the 1.5 update as it rolls out to the G1.

The camera lacks a flash and a self-portrait mirror.

The 3.2-megapixel camera is a mixed bag. Though we were glad to see the video recording and playback, camera-editing feature were nonexistent. Also, while you have an autofocus, we found it as difficult to stabilize the Ion as it was with the G1. It’s too bad, really, as we think that HTC had enough of an opportunity to refine the shooter from the G1.

The SS1’s photo quality was good, but not great.

To view your shots, the Ion has an easily accessible Gallery app. As we mentioned, we had to be careful to avoid blurry shots, but photo quality was decent on the whole. Colors could be brighter, but there was little image noise.

The full HTML browser is also quite similar. As we said earlier, scrolling around Web pages was a painless experience and the accelerometer makes for seamless switching between portrait and landscape modes. Also, we like that onscreen icons allow you to zoom in and out without digging through too many menus. Yet, at the end of the day, we still think that the iPhone has the best Web browser. Not only does its multitouch interface make for easier zooming, but also you only have to tap the top portion of the open Web page to enter a new URL. The Ion, on the other hand, requires a multistop process (press the menu button, select “go,” type in the URL and press “go” again).

Sadly, messaging options aren’t improved from the G1. Though you get a native Gmail app, Google Talk, and access to most POP3 accounts, full Microsoft Exchange Server support is still lacking. Though some versions of the Magic promise such capability, we couldn’t find such support on the Ion. We could use the browser and Outlook Web Access (OWA) to check e-mail, but it’s a rather clunky experience. Also, since the Ion doesn’t appear to offer Outlook syncing for notes, contacts, or calendar, hard-core business users will be shut out from using it as a portable office. To date, the lack of full IMAP4 support remains one of Android’s biggest flaws and we implore Google to correct it soon.

Performance

We tested the Google Ion in San Francisco using T-Mobile service. The Ion is a quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) world phone device that also supports T-Mobile’s 3G network. Call quality was just short of amazing. We enjoyed crystal clear conversations and a strong signal. Voices sounded natural and we encountered no static or interference from other electronic devices. The volume level could be louder–we had trouble hearing in noisy places unless the sound was turned all the way up–but it was fine for most situations. All in all, we were quite pleased.

On their end, callers were also very pleased. In fact, some couldn’t even tell we were using a cell phone. A couple people complained that they had trouble hearing us when we were in noisy environments, which makes sense considering we had a similar problem on our end, but the gripes ended there. Automated calling systems could understand us easily the majority of the time.

Speakerphone calls were decent. Like with the G1, audio was a bit garbled and fuzzy. It wasn’t worse than with many other cell phones on the market, but it was a change from regular voice calls. The volume level remained a tad low, but we could hear callers without too much effort. We had to speak close to the phone if we wanted to be heard on the other end, though it wasn’t a big deal. We tested the Ion with the Samsung SBH-600 stereo Bluetooth headset and had good call quality.

On the upside, the T-Mobile 3G connection was lightning fast under most circumstances. Particularly when using the browser, we noticed a positive change from the iPhone. T-Mobile 3G connection doesn’t seem to penetrate as far into buildings as AT&T’s does, but once you have it, you should be quite satisfied. Google Maps and YouTube videos took a bit longer to load, but we were pleased all around.

Like with the G1, the Ion’s processor performed beautifully. The phone responded quickly to our commands when opening and closing applications and there was no lag time when navigating the menus. More importantly, we didn’t experience any system freezes or crashes.

Multimedia quality was variable. Music quality was fine, as long as you used a Bluetooth or wired headset. Tunes over the single external speaker were tinny, but that’s to be expected on almost any cell phone. Video quality was just OK. Clips that we recorded with the camcorder looked pretty washed out. Also, fast movements looked blurry. YouTube videos were pixelated almost to the point of being bothersome.