The Motorola CLIQ: WINR or LOZR?
by John Paczkowski
Posted on September 10, 2009 at 12:30 PM PT
Motorola has finally announced its bet-the-company Android handset. At GigaOM’s Mobilize 09 event in San Francisco this morning, Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s co-CEO and CEO of the company’s handset division, uncrated the CLIQ, a device it describes unremarkably as the “first phone with social skills.”
Why? Well, the CLIQ, or DEXT as it will be confusingly branded in the U.K., incorporates Motorola’s new “MotoBlur” service, which essentially corrals Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Picasa, GMail and MS Exchange activity into a single feed and presents them on your phone.
In form, the CLIQ is a sideways slider. Like the Palm (PALM) Pre, the device boasts a full touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard. It’s got a 320 x 480-pixel, 3.1-inch HVGA screen and a five-megapixel camera. The CLIQ is video-capable (play, stream and capture) and supports the broad spectrum of media formats. It runs Android 1.5 (Cupcake), and Motorola (MOT) claims a battery life of six hours.
Jha says the phone is not intended to be a single iconic device–like, say, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. Rather, it is the first of a broad line of handsets, all running Android and Motoblur, that will be targeted at different customer segments around the world.
A wise strategy in the current market? Who knows? But at least it’s a step in the right direction. Motorola clearly needs to do something to right itself after the past few disastrous years. Hard to believe the company controlled 16.1 percent of the global handset market just two years ago. It’s market share today? A modest 6.5 percent. The CLIQ will be sold through T-Mobile in the United States.
The device’s spec sheet below; click to enlarge.
Comments
LOZR. In 2009, a pocket screen without touch is broken. This is a miniature notebook computer with phone built-in, but iPhone is a phone with miniature notebook computer built-in. Huge difference. The primary way you interact with iPhone is to hold it in one hand vertically and press on it with the fingers of the other hand. Same as all phones that ever existed. This LOZR asks you to treat it like a notebook computer, make a space for it and unfold it to get at the keyboard/mouse. Nobody does this, nobody has ever done this, stop trying to sell people miniature notebook computers and sell them phones.
Posted by Fred Hamranhansenhansen at September 10th, 2009 at 4:16 pmLOZR.
Posted by Dave Barnes at September 10th, 2009 at 7:09 pmNaming a phone after a woman’s body part (with sexual connotations) is just stupid.