Overall, the Motorola DEXT is a good addition to the Android portfolio, but can be bettered. It's good to see Motorola taking the initiative and providing consumers with the sort of device they'll want. And if it's a QWERTY Android handset you want, then it is well worth looking at.

We have to label the Motorola Dext in the same way we looked at the HTC Hero – MotoBlur is a good platform, but it needs a better phone underneath it before it's a true player. Like the G1 was for Android, the Dext is a marker for what Motorola can achieve, but the Dext isn't going to be the pinnacle if Motorola is to have its hoped-for renaissance.

Would we recommend the CLIQ? Against a G1, yes, if for no other reason than the fact that you're getting more internal memory and a more robust, modern, un-weird hardware design. In the bigger picture, though, we'd keep our wallets in our pockets for the time being -- the CLIQ looks and feels like a testbed, not quite ready for primetime but a genuinely heartening sign that Moto's still got a pulse.

Is this the phone that Motorola needs to bring it back into the smartphone race? It could be. They were smart enough to know that just doing another Android phone wasn't enough in itself, so they pulled together and created all this social networking glue to bind the experience together. It's cohesive enough to call the Cliq a different experience from other, similar devices like the Sprint HTC Hero, and is a pretty damn good first step in a possible Motorola comeback.

The CLIQ itself is less dramatic as a device. Build quality is on par if not slightly better than rival devices and functionally it’s reasonable, but there could be a little more excitement or allure in the physical hardware. There’s a lot to like about the Motorola CLIQ – and about the company’s enthusiastic plans for MOTOBLUR – and to the shallow pool of Android options it’s a strong entrant and an appealing one.