I’m at Gigaom’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco, where Motorola’s Mobile Devices CEO Sanjay Jha just announced an Android-based application, Motoblur, and the company’s first Android phone, the Cliq. He spent most of his time demoing Motoblur, which is a social-networking aggregation interface designed to weave Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, e-mail, and other services into one world. It’s got status updates that can span as many services as you want; widgets capturing content from your friends; a unified address book; hooks into other services such as maps; and more. It’s a hard service to judge from a demo–there’s a lot going on, and a lot of functionality delivered via varying user interfaces. But it’s ambitious and fancy, at least–and unlike anything Apple has built into the iPhone (but at least vaguely reminiscent of the social integration in Palm’s Pre).
Blur will be available on the Cliq, but also on other devices–apparently including another phone to be announced shortly.
Jha didn’t really give a thorough introduction to the Cliq, which will be available for the holidays from T-Mobile. (Yup, another Android phone that’s a T-Mobile exclusive.) Like T-Mobile’s G1, it’s got both a large touchscreen and a landscape-mode sliding keyboard; it also has a five-megapixel camera.
Everyone knows that Motorola needs to take a giant leap forward to be part of the future of smartphones. Unlike Palm’s showstopper of a Pre launch at CES, all Motorola’s unveiling did today is to whet the appetite. But that’s a start.
Here’s a fuzzy photo–more details to come.
