Motorola Announces a Social Networking Smartphone

The Motorola Cliq is designed to appeal to a younger, information-overloaded audience. The key isn't Android, the Google platform the phone is based on. Instead, the key is Motorola's own proprietary cloud-based service, MOTOBLUR, which will pump notifications not just from email and SMS onto your home screen, but from social networking services like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more.

The Motorola Cliq will be available from T-Mobile in the fall. No pricing was announced, but most expect a $99 price point. That would put it in direct competition with the Palm Pixi, which was just announced a day ago.

The Motorola Cliq sports a full touchscreen and a slide-out (landscape) QWERTY keyboard. It has a 320 x 480-pixel, 3.1-inch HVGA screen, wi-fi (unlike the Pixi) and a five-megapixel camera. The CLIQ is video-capable (play, stream and capture).It runs Android version 1.5 (or Cupcake), and Motorola claims six hours of talk time.

A nice, but not great product. It won't be a game-changer, but Motorola is ready to launch a more-expensive Verizon device in a few weeks. These are supposed to be the first devices that will (hopefully for MOT) pull the company back from the brink and into relevancy again.

Palm managed to make itself a player again with webOS. Can Motorola and MOTOBLUR do the same? We'll see.