Motorola's Cliq Builds on iPhone Concept

Take a look at the picture to the right. It’s the just-announced Motorola Cliq, powered by Google Android and T-Mobile and scheduled to be released in time for the holiday season. Do you see that little green button down on the lower right corner of the screen? That’s the dialer - you know, like, for a phone call.

Call these devices smartphones if you’d like - but increasingly, the phone part of the device is just another feature, another widget on the home page.

I talked to some of the attendees at the GigaOm Mobilize show Thursday, which is where Motorola (MOT) and T-Mobile introduced the device, and a couple of them compared this device to the iPhone - no, not in the sense that this is finally the long-awaited iPhone killer. Instead, they see this type of device building on what Apple (AAPL) has been offering with the iPhone, a push away from the “phone” part of mobile device and more toward the apps - or widgets, as Motorola calls them.

One iPhone-carrying attendee told me that the majority of his time spent on the iPhone is through the apps - e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, banking, news”papers” and so on. The user-interface - the way you interact with the apps on the screen - is what’s appealing, he said. (That, plus the AT&T (T) voice service was hit or miss anyway.)

Motorola is trying to take that appeal a step further with MotoBlur, though. The idea behind the Cliq is that it’s all right there in front of you - open already and running on the device’s home page. No more having to find and open and close apps, the way you do on the iPhone. Because it’s a Google device, you can expect that Google’s most popular apps - GMail, Maps, Search - will be deeply integrated into the device, too.

And, of course, there’s Twitter and Facebook. After all, you can’t launch a device like this - which Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha called “The First Phone with Social Skills - and not have Facebook and Twitter built in. After all, these days, those are two of the biggest drivers of mobile data traffic -that, and email, of course.

Earlier this week, Facebook hosted a rooftop mixer for the tech press at its Silicon Valley headquarters to talk about what it’s been doing in mobile. One of the most interesting st ats I heard at that event was that, among Facebook members, those with access to a mobile version spend twice as much time engaged in the Facebook on the site in it than someone who’s only signing on from a PC. Think about that for a second. Twice as much time - because users can update their status from a red light. Yup, the mobility factor is defnitely huge.

Bottom line: Call them apps or widgets, but these are the drivers of the next-generation of smartphones.

And doesn’t it feel kind of silly to keep calling them smartphones when the phone itself is just another app these days - and not even the most-used one, at that. I thought about just calling them “handhelds,” as in “Has anyone seen my handheld?” but that didn’t work for me, either. We definitely need a better name for this category,

Any suggestions?

Comments

[Yagottabe K...:]

If the price is as that T-Mobile web page (there, then gone!) says - that is, free with contract - then this phone is a tremendous game changer.

Sep 11 07:45 AM

[Timeline St...:]

How can a phone that needs to be given away for free be seen as a 'game changer'?

That device, unlike the iPhone, is cluttered and messy. What's the value in that, even for free?

I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced that Android offers anything yet, despite the fact that it's open source and all that business.

Sep 11 08:19 AM

[Kris Tuttle:]

How about "communicator?"

I know it's tainted by having been used in Star Trek but it seems to fit.

video, email, messaging, status updates, location, phone - all sounds right

Sep 11 08:47 AM

[Bad Johnnie:]

I just call it my "mobile", not "mobile phone", "mobile device", but just simply "mobile".

Sep 11 09:10 AM

[Roger Knights:]

I believe the term is already in use (somewhat): Mobile Internet Device (MID).

Sep 11 09:13 AM

[mollytjm:]

i call my iPhone: my iPhone or just 'my cell' (as in 'wireless'). it's actually a pocket computer which, by the way, has a phone. this isn't really true of all 'smartphones'. iPhones have a computer OS and did from the start. since the term pc would actually work (pocket computer) it's too bad it just refers to windoz machines.
so i guess for the time being we're still stuck with smartphones, when we want to talk about the group. i don't think anyone calls their own smartphone a smartphone... they refer to it by it's brand name.

Sep 11 11:33 AM

[User 123757:]

whether it's voice or apps these devices often use the cellular network which points to one of the two 2 likely candidates for most adopted word to replace "phone" in the US -- one already in use -

"cell"

and what the brits already use --

"mobile"

Both descriptives imply including both "voice" and "data" whereas words or acronyms "like MID" might imply or suggest the lack of "voice" in the sense of access to a cellular phone network.

Sep 12 10:46 AM

[ktg oakland:]

A new name for this category of device?

I'd call it a watch. The things people wear on their wrists are, after all, only time pieces.

ktg oakland

Sep 12 06:50 PM

[designjunkie:]

When I designed cell phones in the mid 90s with partners in Germany they called them "Handys". Now that is really the case. I rarely check directions, email or web information before I leave the house. If I need it I can easily and quickly get what I need with my smartphone.

It is interesting that nobody has reported on some of the earlier devices from Nortel and Nokia that pioneered the interfaces and physical design attributes for todays smartphones.

Check out www.freepatentsonline....

This device integrated voice and data with a java based OS, skinny browser, and touch display. iphone utilizes (infringes?) UI and hardware patents that were developed for this limited production device shown in the back room at CeBit 1997

Sep 13 01:41 PM