Motorola Unveils Details of its Android Platform Play, Shows Cliq Phone
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This morning at GigaOm's Mobilize 09 event in San Francisco, Dr. Sanjay K. Jha, Co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of the company's Mobile Devices division, unveiled Motorola's Android platform play. Motorola is going to be placing large bets on the open source operating system over the coming years, but is coming out of the gate with just two Android phones. One was shown at the event today, and another will arrive shortly. Jha delivered a keynote address called "Innovation on Android," and here are the details on his announcements, as well as photos.
As we previewed in previous posts, Motorola has been concentrating on Android handsets for some time. In his keynote, Jha pointed to huge upticks in Internet access from wireless broadband-enabled phones, over-the-air software updates, and a big shift toward collaboration and social behavior on social networks as part of what Motorola wants to bet on with its smartphone strategy. He also pointed to Android as an ideal mobile operating system because it's multithreaded and allows multitasking--a possible shot at the iPhone, which has been criticized for its approach to multitasking.
With those comments as background, Jha showed an initial Motorola Android-based smartphone at Mobilize 09, arriving very shortly, and said that in the coming weeks, Motorola will announce a second Android handset. It will arrive before the holidays. Key to both of the phones, and key to Motorola's overall Android strategy is a new interface and application layer called MotoBlur. It's focused on "a single stream" for social networking features, software updates, messages, syncing, e-mails, videos, photos, and more.
"There is no opening up of apps and menus," Jha emphasized. "From the initial [MotoBlur] homescreen, you can customize all of your content," he added. "We really believe that MotoBlur can be a big differentiator for us," he said. It features one-tap access to all of a user's social networking sites, and the user can broadcast content to multiple social networks, or on various messaging platforms. MotoBlur also allows a user to remotely wipe a phone's content in the event that it is lost.
The initial Android phone from Motorola is a 3G phone called Cliq (shown above, at left, and below), and Motorola has partnered with T-Mobile as service provider. During the announcement of it, Cole Brodman from T-Mobile said that T-Mobile and Motorola are anticipating strong sales of Cliq over the holidays. "We expect it to be one of our hottest selling devices in the fourth quarter," he said. Pricing isn't announced yet, but T-Mobile is confirmed as the exclusive U.S. carrier.
The Cliq phone has a 5-megapixel camera, slide-out keyboard, 24 frame-per-second video capabilities, GPS, a headphone jack, an advanced browser from Google, integrated Exchange service, and Google roaming services including Google voice search, access to maps, Google calendar, and more. It also provides one-click access to Android Market and the thousands of Android applications there.
Jha said that Motorola will announce a second Android-based handset in a few weeks, called Dext, to be available outside the U.S. There are three initial carriers signed on: Orange in the United Kingdom and France, Telefonica in Spain and America Movil in Latin America. You can find more details on Cliq and Dext in Motorola's announcement, here, as well as photos.
Our buddies at JKOnTheRun got their hands on the Cliq phone backstage at Mobilize 09, and you can watch a video they shot of it in action here. They write: "It invokes images of an iPhone, although one with a nice keyboard that slides out of the screen. The keyboard feels really good to use, and the performance of everything is very fast."
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