AllThingsD » MS Exchange

Motorola's DEVOUR: WINR or LOZR?

John Paczkowski — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:59:47 +0000

Verizon this morning copped to what the blogosphere has been jawing about for weeks now: Motorola’s Devour is to be the wireless carrier’s next Android handset. Arriving at market next month, the Devour seems a lower-cost alternative to the Droid, though Verizon (VZ) hasn’t yet named a price for it.

Certainly, the specs, below, for the Devour suggest it will cost significantly less than the $200 Droid commands when tethered to a two-year wireless contract.

Android 1.6 (Donut) with MotoBlur, a Motorola (MOT) service that essentially corrals Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Picasa, GMail and MS Exchange activity into a single feed and presents them on your phone
3.1-inch touchscreen at 320×480
Horizontal slider keyboard
3-megapixel camera
EVDO Rev. A
Wi-Fi b/g
aGPS
Bluetooth with A2DP
HTML 5-compatible Webkit browser
MicroSD card up to 16GB

As I said, Verizon has not disclosed the price for Devour, but $99 sounds about right to me, especially if the company is looking to pit this thing against Apple’s (AAPL) low-end iPhone 3G.

The Motorola CLIQ: WINR or LOZR?

John Paczkowski — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:30:51 +0000

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.

Return of the Steve

John Paczkowski — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:00:36 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]