Motorola announced its first Android operating system-based device, the Cliq yesterday. The hardware is beautifully designed while the software makes a serious attempt to incorporate social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. But more importantly, the future of Motorola may ride partially on the success of the Cliq.

First off, let’s just say the handset gets a lot of things right: The phone itself is nicely designed and feels impossibly thin (for a slider), the touchscreen is responsive and the social networking options are subtly ingrained into the phone — they don’t come out and slap you in the face.

But let’s also say this that the Cliq suffers from feature overload. The UI is messy and challenging to learn — it attempts to bring together too many mobile features and can be confusing and clogged. We suspect that after a few days with the device, it would become easy to master. But right off the bat, operating the phone left us befuddled.

The Cliq’s coming out party was September 9, and then we got the device behind closed doors. Here are the highlights.

Hardware

The Cliq is lovely to hold. It feels quite slim (about 0.62 inches thick) and light (weighing 5.6 ounces). Comparatively, the Palm Pre is 0.67 inches thick and weighs 4.76 ounces, while the iPhone 3G is 0.48 inches thick and weighs 4.7 ounces. The sliding keyboard on the Cliq is smooth and the physical(!) keypad offers fantastic tactile feedback, making touch-typing a very real possibility. The phone comes in a polished black the company calls “Titanium” and “Winter White.” The 3.1-inch display is bright and easy to read — at least under the florescent lighting where we put the phone through its paces. The screen is touch capable and very, very responsive. It’s certainly on par with the iPhone .

User interface

The Cliq runs the Android OS draped in a custom skin from Motorola called Blur. Besides having an idiotic name, the skin collates e-mail, social networking services (Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace) and contacts into a single stream so users don’t have to click through different apps. The phone’s homescreen has three widgets: Social Status, Happenings and Messaging.

Social Status has a text box where you can broadcast your status (eating ice cream or hanging out with friends) and choose the service, such as Facebook, Twitter or MySpace, you want it to be updated to. It’s a neat service and fans of mobile tweeting will appreciate having a feature like this built into their phones.

Messaging can aggregate corporate and personal e-mail accounts and display them on a single screen. You can arrange new messages to pop up in a cardlike view (similar to the Palm Pre) or in an easily scrollable list.

The Happenings widget looks much like a Facebook feed except it brings in information about status updates and photos from other services like Twitter and MySpace too.

Camera

The Cliq has a 5.2-megapixel auto-focus camera. We tested it briefly by shooting some pics in low light and comparing it to photos from the iPhone ’s camera. Guess what? The Cliq’s cam captured finer details and offered a brighter picture with true colors. It’s easy to share and upload photos, in the spirit of Cliq fun. The user interface on every photo has four choices: Share, Gallery, Set as Wallpaper and Delete. Clicking on the Share tab means you can post the photo to MySpace, Gmail, Picasa or any other photo-sharing site you have set up such as Flickr.

Phone

Hey, this thing is supposed to make calls, right? The phone sports a dialer similar to the iPhone , and the keypad has additional features, such as a speed dialer and history (a mashup of e-mails, phone calls and status updates). We didn’t get to test the voice quality of this device, which will be available on the T-Mobile network later this year. Motorola and T-Mobile haven’t said how much the phone will cost, but we’re betting under $200.

Overall

The Cliq is a beautiful piece of hardware, but it suffers from features creep. Too many options are jammed into a skin that, quite frankly, can’t handle them. There’s a reason why the iPhone , the Pre and even the G1 have done so well — the user interfaces are simple and elegant, and they can be learned without an instruction manual. Motorola screwed up with Blur — it adds an obtuse layer of functionality to a device that does not need it.

Moto admits the phone can be overwhelming at first, but claims the complete customization of social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook are worth it. We disagree. Let people pick and choose what social networking sites they want to use on their phones and download apps that best serve their needs. An additional skin like Blur just over-complicates things.

Motrola, hear us out: You guys are not doing well right now. You make great hardware and crappy software. If you want phone buyers to take you seriously, keep producing excellent handsets like the Cliq, load them with top-notch operating systems (Android FTW!) and let it be. People will start buying your products again.

See more photos of the Cliq.

Photos: Courtesy IntoMobile/Will Park