Motorola's CLIQ, MOTOBLUR, Take Phones to New Dimension.

New phones coming out with new hardware/software is hardly breaking news these days. But Motorola has done something a little different, to great fanfare to boot, and that's release a phone that is supposed to be attractive to consumers based on primarily their online service, MOTOBLUR, which is great for social network gurus. Buying a phone for a service? Sounds a little odd, but it makes sense.

Motorola's CLIQ cell phone (in the US anyway - it's DEXT internationally) is built on relatively normal computing hardware, packs a solid frame, good keyboard, and an Android OS. But what really stands out is MOTOBLUR. With this service, you log into whatever social networks you like - Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc - just once, and your phone does the rest. Your home page will display the latest social updates from the networks of your choosing, followed by the latest messages to you of any kind (Email, tweet, text, etc), followed by a space where you can update your status on your own networks. You can share photos just as easily as updates. Your contacts can be synced with your social networks too, attaching profile pictures and status updates. You can see these updates as you scroll through your contacts, and they will also display on the incoming call screen. You also get a standard web browser, GPS, Android market goodies, and all other standard smartphone features. MOTOBLUR even offers "Safe & Secure", a free service (hear that, Apple?) that continuously backs up your information and makes it accessible so that you can wipe data from your phone if you lose it, and then load up all your info onto your new phone without any hassle.

In short, you might say the CLIQ is a phone designed with a purpose, and that's social networking. However, it may be more accurate to say the phone's purpose is really just to use MOTOBLUR, and that is the feature that is designed for the social networking (actually it can handle updates being pushed to it from a number of sources, if you choose). Saul Hansel of the NYT Bits blog put it well when he pointed out that this is represents a shift in focus for handset companies, adding "once you decide that telephones aren’t really just telephones, then you’ve got to accept the that phone makers are not really phone makers."

And so, we consider buying Motorola phones, not because of anything they are, but because of what they can connect to. Motorola plans on releasing other targeted phones over the next 12-18 months too. It remains to be seen if this niche phone angle can really chip away at the do-it-allers like iPhones in the handset market.