T-Mobile is continuing its Android parade with the CLIQ. The MOTOBLUR-running, physical keyboard-sporting phone is now available to current T-Mobile customers for $199. New subscribers will need to wait until November 2nd to get their hands on it.

The Short Version

Motorola has released the phone it should have released a few years ago to compete with phones like the Helio Ocean and feature phones from LG and Samsung. Android brings this phone into the 21st century and the QWERTY keyboard and BLUR UI tweaks will please those looking for a keyboard Android phone with social networking features.

The Long Version
This last half-decade has been hard on Motorola. It launched the RAZR in 2004 and essentially riffed on that ground-breaking clamshell for another four years. Now it’s 2009 and it’s time to move in a different direction. Can this creaky ship of a company take up the line, hoist the mizzen, and tack to starboard? Is the Motorola CLIQ the answer to their deepest, most secret prayers, prayed in anguish under a stifling cover of imminent collapse? How many more metaphors can I use here and still sound like I’m writing for a business magazine?

First, I finger wag. Motorola, you have been very bad. You squandered your massive lead (110 million RAZRs sold by 2005) on a strategy that included, but was not limited to, trying to copy the magic of the RAZR while the rest of the industry was going the way of the smartphone. Then you tried to build out some Windows Mobile phones that no one wanted and, in the end, lost out to just about every rival you’ve ever had. This is bad.

So here’s your hail Mary pass, your Radio Free Europe, your return to four-letter naming conventions. I present the Motorola CLIQ.

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.