Computerworld — The Motorola Cliq, on display for the first time at International CTIA this week, has hardware features such as a touch screen atop a slideout QWERTY keyboard designed to lure buyers, but its new Motoblur software could be its most important novelty.

10 Hot Touchscreen Phones Compared

With Motoblur, which uses the Android operating system and interface, users will be able to combine up to 10 social networking sites and other applications, such as work e-mail and photo tools, on a single home screen for easy access.

Several CTIA visitors at Motoblur's booth had trouble understanding Motoblur, or its value, posing a potential challenge for T-Mobile USA, which begins selling the Cliq for $200 at stores nationwide Nov. 2.

However, spokeswomen for both T-Mobile and Motorola said they don't expect much confusion over Motoblur from buyers, whom they predict will mostly be in their 20s and 30s and will likely be interested in quick home page access to updates from friends and co-workers in various social networking sites, alongside their work e-mail or other applications. While that capability might not appeal to all ages and types of cell phone users, the socially connected group is clearly driving the explosion in data usage witnessed by the nation's wireless carriers.

In addition to combining applications on a single home screen, users of Motoblur will be able to keep up to five separate home screens a single swipe away from each other. That means a user could put work applications on a single home screen, then swipe left or right over to personal applications on another of the five home screens.

Users whose lives involve various jobs or roles, or who are active in social networks, might find Motoblur's organization scheme valuable. Gartner Inc. analyst Ken Dulaney recently called the Cliq Motoblur and Android OS generally a good combination of the software functions available in the iPhone and phones from Windows Mobile and Nokia.

What is evident with the Cliq and some other smartphones is that their designs are moving into a second or third stage of evolution where software services such as Motoblur, rather than hardware features, offer buyers new choices. That's a shift from two years ago, when the iPhone caught the world by storm with a radical new touch-screen design and related interface.

In fact, Motoblur software takes Motorola and the Cliq into an area of services that, until now, seemed to have been the domain of software companies like Yahoo Inc., which has been combining social networking buttons, such as Facebook and Twitter, with e-mail on a single screen on hundreds of smartphones and cell phones for a while.

Continue Reading