The consumer-minded Cliq puts social networking front and centre, with a beefier ‘mobile professional’ version soon to follow. Alas, we won’t see either until sometime in 2010.
Motorola is hoping get its mojo back with the
Cliq. The first of two Android smartphones from the once-mighty mobile mogul, the Cliq is set for US release by November with a global rollout to follow in 2010, where it will labour under the far dumber name of Dext.
Previously codenamed the ‘Morrison’, the Cliq takes aim at the mainstream market. The 3.1 inch HVGA (320 x 480 pixel) screen conceals a slide-out QWERTY keyboard to complement the on-screen virtual keypad of Android 1.5 ‘Cupcake’.
Also on the checklist is 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and a 5.0 megapixel videocamera. Storage is based on microSD memory cards rather than an internal solid state drive.
Perched atop the standard Android OS and feature set is Motorola’s own MotoBlur user interface, which mimics many other smartphone home screens by planting a bunch of live widgets onto the home screen.
MotoBlur is heavily geared towards social networking, with updates from Facebook, Twitter and My Space all pushed onto the home screen along with the latest email and SMS messages. Motorola says this will save users time in opening, closing and swicthing between individual applications.
But MotoBlur goes a few steps further. The ‘unified inbox combines emails, text messages and direct messages from the likes of Twitter and Facebook, while the phone’s address book contains a similar degree of integration.
Motorola also offers a cloud-based backup service so that your phone’s contents are automatically pushed to and stored a remote server.
The coming-real-soon 'Sholes' (spyshot courtesy of motofan.ru) is an Android smartphone for the serious business user
Later this month the Cliq will be joined by a second Android smartphone codenamed ‘Sholes’. This one has the business user and mobile professional in its sights, with a sleek metal design, massive 3.7 inch (480 x 854 pixel) screen and a beefy 600MHz processor which contains separate engines for video and image processing.
Sholes is also tipped to ship with Android 2.0, which the sweet-toothed Google engineers have codenamed Eclair.