Motorola has got a thing for four letter words. No, no – not those words. You know, device names like RAZR, ROKR, etc. Thus, it came as no surprise that its first entry into the Androidian landscape, which was announced earlier this month, is yet another four letter word: CLIQ.

Although not expected to ship until sometime next month, the ever-resourceful Boy Genius has got his hands on a pre-release CLIQ and has been kind enough to share some insights.

Feel free to read through the whole dang thing, or if you are more a CliffsNotes kinda guy or gal, just take a quick spin through our recap:

Hardware:
As we noted in our first look, BGR thinks the CLIQ has a solid feel to it, albeit a bit plastic-y, with a good slider mechanism and a responsive but cramped capacitive touch screen display. He isn’t as keen on the keyboard as many early reviews, citing hard, cheap plastic keys, and apparently the battery life is just plain awful (possibly an early software bug).

MOTO BLUR:
BGR has mixed feelings on MOTO BLUR, Motorola’s new UI/modification for Android. The good: Motorola has done a good job of implementing its Android mods to maximize the phone’s hardware. The bad: BLUR’s attempt to simplify our social networking lives is more of a valiant effort at the moment than a fully functioning, life-altering organization tool.

The overall bottom line is that with some software tweaks, this isn’t a bad start for Motorola and Android, but its definitely not quite a full-baked concept, yet. For more, head on over to BGR for the rest of the in-depth MOTO CLIQ preview.

Last Thursday, Motorola announced its first Android-based smartphone, Cliq, alongside its new custom Android interface, MOTOBLUR. Although no specific availability or pricing information was released, it was pretty clear (read: T-Mo’s CTO was on stage) that T-Mobile would be the exclusive carrier of MOTO’s new Hail Mary device.

But that was so last week. Fast forward a few days and there are now reports suggesting that T-Mo’s exclusivity will either be short-lived, or possibly even non-existent. According to the Wall Street Journal, Motorola co-CEO, Sanjay Jha, said Monday that his company is “in talks with all large operators in U.S.” and is “fairly hopeful [Motorola] will begin to engage with all the U.S. operators.”

In all likelihood, we’re willing to bet that T-Mobile will indeed be the exclusive Cliq carrier, albeit for a very brief time. If the Cliq is really going to save Motorola, then by all means, it’s clearly in MOTO’s best interest to have it and its soon to be revealed MotoDroid siblings available on as many mobile carriers as possible.

FierceWireless via WSJ

The highly anticipated Motorola announcement has come and gone. After all the dust cleared, the world of Android handsets had grown by one – Motorola’s first Android-powered smartphone, CLIQ.

We tried to get some time with the new MotoDroid following the presentation, but ended up grabbing some boxed lunches instead. Luckily, MOTO was kind enough to invite us over to its swanky after party @ the SF MOMA for a little hands-on love.

Right off the bat, we were impressed with the build quality of the Cliq. The handset has a solid, weighty feel to it, the landscape QWERTY keyboard slides out with confidence and the buttons have good travel, there is a 3.5 mm jack (a must), and the display is covered in glass making it more robust and easier to swipe and do other touch gestures. The device is also more slender than it appears.

As for MOTOBLUR, we were very pleased with how quickly it seemed to operate, especially considering that the phone shares many of the same guts as some of its less snappy Android cousins. Motorola, much like Palm with WebOS, has clearly made a great effort to improve the user experience through its implementation of MOTOBLUR. The UI blends many of the hottest social tools (Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM, etc) in a manageable and useful mobile interface.

That’s really it for now, until we get to spend more time putting the Cliq through its paces. In the meantime, enjoy some more hands-on photos below as well as the video which provides some more insight into the new MOTOBLUR + Cliq “experience.”

[PSGallery=3cc210a3avr]