Motorola’s newest phone, the Cliq, just debuted as the company’s first Android offering. The primary feature of the Cliq is its “Moto Blur” custom interface that meshes e-mail, texts, Facebook messages, Twitter feeds and photos into a single interface.
The Cliq will be a T-Mobile phone available later this year, but Motorola didn’t offer any clues as to the price at the Mobilize conference where they introduced it, and wouldn’t allow attendees to inspect the phone too closely. It will be a touch screen device with a slide-out keyboard, 5-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, 3G connectivity, 24-frame-per-second video capabilities, a standard headphone jack and GPS abilities.
T-Mobile’s chief technology officer Cole Brodman said that “This is the first phone with social skills. Cliq and Moto Blur is the start of the next chapter of Android and shows significance of the platform.” If you’re an international reader, you’ll be able to buy the phone as the Moto Dext.
Hopefully the Cliq, and another phone promised by Motorola before the holiday season, will be the hit they need to pull them out of the financial slump of the last two years. Motorola has stated that this is only the beginning of the Android-based handsets they’ve been focusing on lately. They are the third company to debut an Android phone—HTC and T-Mobile both released Android phones last October.
Motorola’s distinguishing feature looks to be the new custom interface, Moto Blur. According to the co-CEO of Motorola, Sanjay Jha, the Blur combines all messaging and photo input from a variety of sources “in a single stream and sync[s] them together with no different logins. This means you can focus on what people have said instead of how and where they said it.”
Also, similar to the Apple iPhone Mobile Me service, the Blur will back up user information, including messages, on their servers so that if you lose the phone, you can track it through GPS or wipe the data remotely. However, Motorola one-ups the iPhone, and other handsets on the market, by integrating all social media into one smooth interface, rather than dividing them up among separate programs.
Motorola hopes the success of the Android apps marketplace and the social aggregation trend, which the Cliq capitalizes on, will interest customers to give Motorola’s first foray into the Android world a try.
