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.”