Attention shoppers: Motorola's Cliq is coming. T-Mobile on Tuesday confirmed pricing and availability for the Motorola Cliq, Motorola's first smartphone on Google's Android platform and a potentially big step toward revitalizing Motorola's flagging mobile device fortunes.
According to T-Mobile, Motorola Cliq will be available to existing T-Mobile customers on October 19 and new customers starting November 2 in T-Mobile stores. It will sell for $200 with a voice and data plan, provided customers commit to a two-year contract.
Motorola unveiled Cliq earlier this month at the GigaOM Mobilize Conference in San Francisco, and expects the device to jump-start its strategy to build mobile devices around Google's open-source Android platform.
Among other features, the Cliq is the first device to incorporate Motorola's MotoBlur, a custom interface, and essentially an Android skin, that aggregates all of a user's social networking and communications tools into one interface.
Motorola Cliq is 3G and includes a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 3.1 inch touch screen, a five-megapixel camera with autofocus and 24-frames-per-second playback video capture, a music player pre-configured for Amazon's mp3 store, WiFi, a 3.5 mm headset jack and 2 GB of memory, expandable up to 32 GB. Through the Android platform, Cliq also has one-touch access to Google mobile services like Google Maps, Picasa and Google Search by voice.
Once a dominant name in cell phones, Motorola has watched its mobile device stature diminish over the past few years, and its earnings take tumble after tumble. It expects a newer focus on Android devices to help it claim back some market share, and now will have Cliq in time for the holiday shopping season.
At $200, the price is comparable to Apple's iPhone 3GS, about $20 more than HTC's Android-based, Sprint-carried Hero phone, and a solid $100 more than the Palm Pre.
