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Motorola has always been one of my favorite mobile phone vendors so I have felt somewhat bereft as the company has slowly fallen pray to it’s own hesitancy and miss-steps. There was a time when Moto made high status phones. I remember when the Star-Tac was the phone to own. Then the RAZR came and changed the game. It was such a monster hit that the company decided they could just keep making slight variations on the phone forever…as the industry rushed past them.

The Q line are solid phones, but there is no doubt the shift in the industry towards smartphones and away from chic feature phones left Motorola high and dry. A new direction was badly needed, but over the last year Moto has just produced more RAZR and ROKR retreads. Music and Camera phones won’t save the once proud company.

Therefore I was overjoyed to read some time ago that Motorola was moving wholeheartedly into the Googlephone camp. More information is now surfacing, like this tidbit found in Business Week…

In the next year, social networking phones are expected to be a hit with the 16- to 34-year-old crowd, analysts say. According to consultancy Informa (INF), the number of mobile social-networking users will rise from 2.3% of global cell-phone users at the end of 2007 to as many as 23% of all mobile users by the end of 2012.

The Android handset will feature a touch screen about the size of those on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, people familiar with the phone say. While it takes some of the design cues from Krave ZN4, the first touch-screen phone from Motorola launched with Verizon Wireless on Oct. 14, it’s not certain whether the Android phone screen will feature Krave’s distinctive and interactive clear flip screen.

Like the world’s first Android phone, from HTC, Motorola’s Android-based device will offer a slide-out Qwerty keyboard.

From the description, and the Social Networking angle this is another Android phone that will get no love in the enterprise, but that isn’t a bad thing. Apple has certainly proven there is gold in the consumer smartphone market.

While I still prefer WM, Motorola needs to break into new territory and I think an Android phone is a great choice for them. Hopefully this new direction will lead to a company saving success.

Zealot (446 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).