Motorola Cliq coming in Q4 with Blur social service

IDG News Service - Motorola on Thursday announced its first Android smartphone, which will ship in the fourth quarter with T-Mobile USA under the name Cliq.

The touchscreen phone will use an upcoming Internet-based service for Motorola phones, called Blur, which will integrate information from users' contacts on a variety of social-networking services including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Blur users will be able to combine their contacts on all those networks into one contact list, organize their own groups or divide contacts by social network, according to Sanjay Jha, co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of the company's Mobile Devices group.

The Cliq, unveiled at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco, will have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard as well as a touchscreen. It will come with Wi-Fi as well as 3G (third-generation) connectivity, a 5-megapixel camera that can shoot video at 24 frames per second and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack.

The device will be called the Dext in other markets. In the fourth quarter it will also be introduced with Orange in France and the U.K., Telefónica in Spain and América Móvil in Latin America, Jha said. No pricing was revealed Thursday for any market.

"It's a very important starting point for us," Jha said.

Within the next few days, Motorola will introduce another Android handset that will ship in time for the year-end holiday season, Jha said.

Next year the company will roll out many more devices worldwide, in different form factors, that can use the Blur service, he said.

"I see smartphones as the future of consumer and prosumer computing," Jha said during a conversation on stage with Om Malik, founder of the GigaOm Network, which organized the conference. "If it doesn't fit in your pocket, I don't think it's going to be a relevant device from a consumer and prosumer point of view."

Motorola hopes the new social service, which goes by the full name of Motoblur, will help to differentiate its handsets in an increasingly competitive market. The service can provide a snapshot view of all of a user's e-mail, text and social-networking messages, Jha said. From the same view, the user will be able to respond via any of those methods. It will also keep contacts' posts from all social-networking sites up to date and available for immediate viewing.

All settings and data for the service will be maintained in a cloud infrastructure, so if a phone is lost or stolen, it can be wiped clean remotely. When the user retrieves the phone or gets a new one, they can log back in with the same username and password and get all their data back, Jha said.