Motorola CLIQ review

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 15th 2009 12:14AM]

First! Hahahahaha

[Information Central Posted Oct 15th 2009 6:58AM]

Now that the dumb-ass has been buried...

Here we have yet another bulky, GSM-only phone from Motorola, apparently tied to the third-tier carrier.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 15th 2009 12:16AM]

G1 owners, if you want to test drive the Moto Blur functionality on your G1, there is a rom/port available now for download.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=557982
Ciao

[Omagus Posted Oct 15th 2009 12:25AM]

"North America's only top-five handset manufacturer"
--

I know the top four is Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, LG (in some order)...who is fifth? And where do Palm and RIM rank?

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 15th 2009 6:29AM]

Outside the the top four (Nokia, Samsung, LG, and SEMC) it changes month-to-month between Moto, RIM, Huawei, HTC, Fujitsu, and Sharp. So RIM is somewhere in that group depending on who's releasing new phones.

Note that although Moto is one of the traditional "top 5" there have been many months over the last year when they were nowhere near in the top 5 by actual sales volume.

Palm are way way down the list; I'd guess around 20th. Just to give you an idea, Nokia mobile phones has quarterly sales of €8 billion, Sony Ericsson (lowest of the top 4) has quarterly sales of €1.7 billion, RIM had sales of €2.3 billion, and Palm had Q2 sales of €48 million ($65 million). It's a completely different league.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 15th 2009 10:42AM]

@AE
What are you talking about? For the past year Motorola and SEMC have been neck and neck. Motorola will still do 50-60M phones this year, way above anyone else you mentioned.
Motorola has been hurting a lot, but they are still way above Fujitsu, Sharp, Huwei, HTC, and RIM.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 15th 2009 11:39AM]

He's right. In worldwide cellphone figures at the start of this year, it's Nokia, Samsung, then Moto and LG more or less tied, then SE in fifth, and finally RIM. HTC is buried in the 10%-ish "other" slice of the pie.

RIM only gets into the top 5 when you limit it to smartphones, which are only a tenth of the market. There they're in second place behind Nokia, and slightly ahead of Apple.

This is based on marketshare, not revenue, mind you.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 15th 2009 2:02AM]

SonyEricsson is fifth globally, and that is what he meant I believe.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 15th 2009 7:24AM]

Would love to watch the video, but tubemogul just reads "Video Information Loading". Just use YouTube.