GigaOm’s Mobilize 2009 Conference was the site of a major product announcement as Dr. Sanjay Jha, the chief executive officer of Motorola’s Mobile Devices business unit, took the opportunity to show off Motoblur, on a smartphone running the Android operating system. On stage, Dr. Jha referred to the device as “Motoblur”, but a check of the company Web site and marketing material from T-Mobile indicates that Motorola’s device carries the CLIQ(TM) brand and Motoblur is a suite of widgets that are organized to present contacts, calendar items, friends, Tweets, Facebook entries and the like on a touch screen. The CLIQ with Motoblur is “coming soon” to T-Mobile stores in the U.S.

Following his initial presentation, Dr. Jha’s presentation was joined by conference host Om Malik and Google’s VP of Engineering for a “fireside chat.” In this relatively informal discussion, the three discussed how how the marriage of Google and Motorola came about, with Jha likening it to “two drunks at a bar” discovering that they belonged together. We’re not sure that’s the most ringing endorsement of the Android operating system, but it does have a social ring to it.

As for the Motoblur experience, a video demo illustrated that Motorola expects the smartphone to emerge as a highly personalized (or customized) social networking device – that is also a phone. The new user interface makes it easy for CLIQ owners to bring all their “favorites” – referring to feeds, contact lists, social media – on to the glass so that it can be accessed “at the swipe of a finger.” Simplifying the complex aspects being “always on” is an important design criterion for motoblur. But this puts the onus of the initial set up on the user and, if past experience is a performance indicator, the general public might be up to the task of setting up and maintaining their initial settings. Frankly, it looked a lot like Yahoo!’s old OneConnect application, at least aspirationally.

Branding confusion aside, the introduction raised many more questions than it answered. We know that Motorola is introducing a new phone based on Android and that T-Mobile will be selling it to its subscribers in the U.S. We don’t know when it will be introduced and we don’t know its price, or how it will compare with T-Mobile’s G-1 phone, from the Taiwanese manufacturer HTC. We do know that Motorola and T-Mobile are going to sell “CLIQ with Motoblur” to help subscribers deal with their addiction to social media. It’s not the Crackberry; it’s the Blurberry.

From Google’s point of view, the ability to have multiple applications open at the same time and to enable users to multi-thread through their messages and feeds is a precursor to the promise of Google Wave. The Motorola folks have done the heavy lifting of Wave emulation in advance of the coming of HTML5. It’s a bunch of widgets running on top of Android on a pretty fast central processor. We’re looking forward to the marketing campaign, when T-Mobile’s roll-out begins. That’s when the speed of adoption will be dictated by end-users.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Motorola, Android, mobile services