September 14th, 2009
Motorola bullish on Android, Motoblur rollout in 2010
Motorola today offered a few more details about last week’s launch of Cliq and its plans to differentiate itself in an increasingly-open, fast-changing mobile world during a presentation at the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference.
Specifically, Dr. Sanjay Jha, co-CEO of the company, wanted to differentiate between social networking and MotoBlur, which he described as an “experience” that allows users a unique way to engage in social networking.
For the launch, social networking seemed to be the best way to illustrate and explain how MotoBlur works. But it’s the only way to use it - and that will become more evident and the service continues to rollout.
There’s been a question, he said, on how Motorola wil be able to differentiate itself on Google’s Android operating system when the OS is open. The differentiator, he said, is the MotoBlur experience, which was built on top of Android. At the conference today, Jha said:
Android provides us with a very good platform… which has a very good browser built in and compelling apps like Gmail, Google Earth built in.
The device will launch with T-Mobile in the U.S. in the coming months. Jha also said it will launch the device - under the name Dext - with Orange in the UK and France, Telefonica in Spain and América Móvil in Latin America in the same time frame.
The company also said a number of these devices will be rolled out next year globally and that they will all focus around variations of Motoblur. He said there are plans to launch multiple products in the U.S. in the first quarter and hinted that, through Motorola, Googly Android devices will be available on all of the big carriers early next year. Motorola is talking to all of the big carriers but hasn’t cut deals with them all yet.
Speaking briefly about the impact on the bottom line, he said that he wouldn’t be surprised to see a “break-even” quarter in 2010. “That’s a long way away from 08 and 09 but we’ve seen good improvement so far.”
Previous coverage: Cliq builds on iPhone idea, pushes away from smart”phone” category
Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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