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Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha introduced the Motorola CLIQ, which is being sold by T-Mobile, at the Mobilize 09 show in San Francisco today.
At first blush of the specs and pics, the CLIQ is hardly monumental or groundbreaking. It seems to hew fairly closely to the T-Mobile Android myTouch 3G and the Sprint HTC Hero in that it’s a smartphone with a theme; CLIQ’s happens to be social networking.
Just as the Hero has Sense for customizable bake widgets and the myTouch leverages Geodelic’s Sherpa as a discovery engine, the CLIQ boasts MOTOBLUR, which blends friends, pics, e-mails, messages, and Facebook, MySpace and Twitter happenings in one Web service. GigaOm got a demo of the CLIQ with MOTOBLUR here, but the glare ruins the experience.
Read the details from the New York Times here, and check out the full specs here, but see the pics here first:
My impression? People will buy it, but not enough to make a huge impact for Motorola, which has seen phone sales languishing in parallel with the rise of Apple’s iPhone.
And, while it is another weapon Android has in the market to chip away at said iPhone, I don’t see anything spectacular here to get Motorola out of its rut.
Anyone agree, disagree?
UPDATE: Ironically, not long after I published this post, Liza Gannes published this post on GigaOm quoting Motorola’s Jha as saying the CLIQ was not “the make-or-break phone,” but rather “the first step in a long journey,” and promised tens of products over the next 15-18 months in the MotoBlur family.”
Should Motorola investors take comfort in this? Is time on Motorola’s side?