Motorola's First Android, the "Cliq" With MOTOBLUR

Motorola's first Android phone was announced today by Motorola CTO Sanjay Jha at GigaOm's Mobilize conference in San Francisco.  The phone is Motorola Cliq MB200, which looks like the same phone that was widely leaked as the Morrison.  Thankfully the toy-like bright blue trim featured in most of the leaked shots has been replaced by basic black.  Specs include:

• 3.1-inch HVGA touch-screen display
• 5 megapixel auto focus camera with geo tagging, video capture and 24 fps playback
• 3.5mm headset jack
• music player with pre-loaded Amazon MP3 store application
• Google apps (Mail, Maps, Voice Search, GTalk, Market, YouTube),  Quickoffice Viewer, Accuweather, Shazam, LastFm and  iMeem Mobile pre-installed
• Included 2GB  microSD memory card with support for up to 32 GB of removable memory.
• UMTS/HSDPA, Wi-Fi with UMA
• QWERTY slide-out keyboard
• 4.49 x 2.28 x 0.62 inches (114 x 58 x 16 mm)
• 5.75 oz (163 g)
• 1420 mAh battery, 6 hours talk time, 14 days stand-by

The Cliq will be released on T-Mobile USA in time for the holidays.  It will be marketed worldwide as the DEXT with availability in the 4th quarter of 2009 on Orange in France and the UK, América Móvil in Latin America and Telefónica in Spain.

Jha promised another Motorola Android phone would be announced in two weeks.  I suspect this is the " Sholes " a  CDMA handset for Verizon. Also mentioned was Motorola's intention to release "many" Android devices in 2010.

The biggest thing about the announcement is probably not the Cliq's  hardware but MOTOBLUR, a Motorola customization for Android that appears to combine:

• Custom active homescreen widgets for Facebook and Twitter.
• A single inbox for email, IM, SMS, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace updates .
• The ability to post Tweets and status updates directly from the home screen.
• An integrated phonebook which includes your Twitter and  Facebook friends.
• continuous synchronization and cloud back up of all your BLUR personal data and customizations.
• Remote wipe If  your phone gets lost or stolen.
• Restore and transfer of  BLUR data to a replacement phone.

The onstage demo of MOTOBLUR left many questions unanswered but Motorola has put a lot of information up on their site already including a press release with high res image s and a consumer page with full specs and a MOTOBLUR video and interactive simulator.  There's also a video hands on posted on GigOM .

posted by Dennis Bournique
September 10, 2009 @ 1:08 pm
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