• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 10, 2009

Aiming to revive its once formidable phone business, Motorola Thursday unveiled its long-awaited smartphone built on Google's open Android operating system at a splashy launch event in San Francisco.

With its new Cliq device and proprietary Motoblur software, the company is betting big on mobile social networking as a key to restoring its former glory as a cell phone maker. Motoblur -- Motorola's version on the Android platform -- is designed to centralize and streamline all of a user's social networking and messaging contacts and communications in a user-friendly interface.

Branded as "the first phone with social skills," the Cliq will be offered exclusively by T-Mobile USA in time for the holidays in the U.S., and will sold internationally as the Motorola "Dext" through Orange in the United Kingdom and France, Telefonica in Spain and America Movil in Latin America. Pricing for the Cliq was not announced.

Sanjay Jha, co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of Motorola Mobile Devices, also hinted that a second Motorola Android phone will be announced in a few weeks. Motorola is also rumored to be lining up Verizon Wireless, and possibly AT&T, to carry other Android phones powered by Motoblur.

During his presentation at GigaOM's Mobilize '09 conference introducing the Cliq and Motoblur, Jha positioned the device as a response to smartphone users feeling "overwhelmed" by an array of features without being able to easily manage and access them.

To that end, Motoblur allows users to sync contacts, posts, messages, and photos from disparate sources spanning social sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, to personal and work email, to music service LastFM -- and deliver these information streams to the home screen via widgets.

A "Happenings" application, for instance, lets someone see all their social site updates in one place, while a "Messages" app gathers personal and work email and social network and IM messages in one location. Another one enables someone to send out status updates to all their social networking accounts at once. And as an Android-based system, users can also tap into Google's Android Market for additional mobile apps.

In addition to its Motoblur special sauce, the Cliq also comes equipped with features that are becoming standard for smartphones including a touchscreen, HTML browser, 5-megapixel camera, WiFi capability, and slide-out Qwerty keyboard.

Motorola has a lot riding on the Cliq and its expected new lineup of Android phones. With the heyday of the Razr long past, the company in recent years has been overtaken by competitors such as Apple, BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion and Nokia, which have all capitalized on rising demand for smartphones. For Motorola, the very future of its money-losing phone business is at stake.

"It's hard to underestimate how important this launch is for Motorola as a going concern in terms of being a handset vendor," said Avi Greengart, research director for consumer devices at technology research firm Current Analysis.

So will the Cliq do the trick? Having been pre-briefed on the Cliq, Greengart believes it's good enough to get Motorola back in the cell phone game. It that light, it could be akin to what the Pre did for Palm. Not an iPhone-killer per se, but a contender.

"When you look at it from a carrier-by-carrier perspective, and look at the experience that Motoblur provides, that should be enough to keep Motorola going," he said. But he doesn't view the Cliq as the breakthrough Jha described.

"I don't think what they've shown is terribly unique," he said. "I've seen similar social networking integration from HTC, from Palm and Nokia." But he added that despite its declining phone business fortunes in recent years, Motorola still enjoyed more brand recognition in the U.S. than a rival like Taiwan-based HTC.

For his part, Motorola's Jha tried to downplay the significance of the Cliq's launch. "Is this phone the make or break point? No," he said during a brief Q&A session with conference host and blogger Om Malik and Andy Rubin, Google's senior director of mobile platforms. "But it's a very important starting point for us. The first step in a long journey."