Motorola Quench early review: It's all a Motoblur

We're always hankering for another gulp of mobile-phone goodness, and the Motorola Quench aims to slake our thirst with a tumbler of social-networking features poured over some Android ice cubes.

The Quench is rather like a Motorola Dext that's had its keyboard ripped off and thrown in the bin. To make up for the lack of physical buttons, Motorola has included Swype on its virtual keyboard. Swype aims to make typing easier by letting you run your finger all over the keyboard in one continuous movement, rather than pecking out individual letters. Then Swype figures out which word you were trying to spell. We'll be taking this feature for an eight-fingered test drive in our full review soon.

Unlike the Motorola Milestone, which runs a vanilla version of Android 2.0 without many tweaks, most of Motorola's Android phones stick with version 1.5 of the operating system so that they can serve up Motoblur. Motoblur is a collection of social-networking widgets that do things like show live tweets on your home screen, as well as a cloud-based service that backs up your data online.

Android 1.5 may sound dated to fans of the operating system, but Motorola hopes that the pleasure of having Motoblur's extra features will outweigh the pain of feeling slightly behind the Android curve.

Motorola is staying mum about networks and prices, but expect the Quench to cost you less than the Dext.

Thirsty for more? Watch our hands-on video, then click 'Continue' for more Quenching photos.

The big button on the front of the Quench is actually a trackpad for those times when you don't want to cover the touchscreen with your finger. It's not as attractive as the one on the HTC Legend, for example, but it does the job.

We love the Swype input feature, although it does lead to fingerprint trails all over the screen, like your finger's a snail on speed.

The 5-megapixel camera and photo light on the back are snuggled in a rubbery case.