Motorola, which is recruiting as many as 350 people to work on Android phones, is gearing up to make its first one:the Android Social Smart Phone. Last week, Android Guys spotted a job posting for the project, and now BusinessWeek has more details, including a mention of the Motorola job posting pictured at left on Monster looking for an Android application developer. If the people pictured in the ad to represent Motorola employees are any indication, embarrassing dance moves are a plus, but not required.
According to BusinessWeek, Motorola is putting $50 million into its Android project, which is being run by a team from Good Technology, a mobile e-mail company that Motorola bought in 2006. The first phone won’t come out until the second quarter of next year, it will have a touch screen like the iPhone and a slide-out keyboard like the HTC T-Mobile G1 launching on Wednesday, but will look more like the Motorola Krave. It is also expected to be cheaper than the G1’s $180 price.
But how will it tie into existing social networks? Already, the G1 imports your contacts from Gmail into the phone. It wouldn’t be too hard for the Motorola Android to import your friends’ list from Facebook or MySpace directly into the phone’s address book, and let you IM them and see their status updates and activity streams on your phone. Kind of like the Facebook app on the iPhone lets you do already, except that you wouldn’t necessarily need to launch a separate app.
Is the idea of a Facebook phone or a MySpace phone interesting enough in and of itself for people to want to buy it? And, more importantly, can Android save Motorola?
Guy with the dreadlocks FTW!
When it comes to motorola against compititors, its not just software – its hardware, stupid.
And android maybe free os, but it will not save motorola coz of its hardware inferiority.
Motorola never had a OS, nokia kept its os closed for long and android is definitely way to go for moto.
Awesome. We can all begin calling Motorola’s Android Social Smart Phone by its simpler name, the ASSphone.
lol @ ASSphone …. I wonder when will non-US countries will get their android phone ….
http://www.confiz.com
mattgunn for president.
I don’t know what’s happened to Motorla. I hope they come out of it because for a time they were really innovative.
I think this is a brilliant idea, mobile is an increasingly important mechanism for staying connected to social networks and of course the people on those social networks. Beyond consumption of media, more and more of my “social media” is being produced on my phone, so it’s very natural that the phone becomes the defacto mechanism for staying in touch. In July last year when Dave Winer was experimenting with setting up the N800 as a central tool for his social media creation I was inspired to try and have an open “social media phone” brainstorm on my blog, it was pretty interesting the responses I got http://experien...ters-brainstorm
The other good thing about a social media phone is of course it markets itself (if it is awesome) because the target market is one of the most connected in the world by definition
(full disclosure, i work for Nokia, but am not speaking for them in any official capacity)
Let a thousand flowers bloom, that is the beauty of an open system. The kids can have their facebook phone and I can have the sourcecode to build a slashdot phone.
Why not have a Berkeley phone or an MIT phone, already set up to access course materials, forums, locate colleagues on campus and collaborate on projects?
Why not have an internal IBM phone for their workers to do all that enterprisey stuff?
I know the NSA released the specs to their own “secure” handheld device last year that ran windows mobile lol. Now the feds and all the police departments can have their own setup (with ssh).
Hopefully in 3 years there will be so many varieties of Android that we won’t even remember the first generation.
What I don’t get here is why a hardware manufacturer supposed to bother with any special versions of phone when Android is for anyone to develop an application to suit someone’s taste. Honestly, I don’t get it at all but my guess is that for Motorola is something of a sales point – offering the first social phone.
I think that you are right when you say that this technology is only the beginning of it. The generation of phones with android that we will see in the near future will undoubtedly be focused on marketing to the users of social networks like facebook and the whatnot. I am excited for this technology to progress and turn into something useful to all.
Great stuff Bob, the ability to have phone that nails the core technologies that stitch together social media is really the winning formula. In the end sites like facebook, slashdot, digg etc. become the applications that you add and take away as appropriate.
It’s not the operating system.
It’s about how cheap a manufacturer can make a phone.
This can only be achieved by large numbers of components purchase and full production lines.
Nokia and Samsung have the larger quantities:
2008 Q3
Nokia 120mio 39%
Samsung 46mio 15%
Motorola 30mio 10%
LG 27mio 9%
Sony Ericsson 23mio 8%
Total all vendors 305mio 100%
Motorola needs to jump over Samsung and they are betting on Android
From Gartner: http://tinyurl.com/6gjspn
http://compound..._worldwide.html
From the 305mio sold:
Asia Pacific: 105mio +20% over last year
Eastern Europe – Middle East – Africa: 56mio +18%
North America: 44mio +6%
Europe: 42mio -8%
South America: 39mio +19%
Japan: 9mio -22%
Asia Pacific is the leading market to win.
Eastern Europe – Middle East and South America have their importance too.
What will be produced will be popular in those countries.
They decide.
Wrong strategy..let me explain
Apple iPhone can do web 2.0 mashups using html and javascript via web widgets for facebook, myspace, and etc.
Rather than do what iPhoen does which requires a certain d-buss to browser plugin Moto has decided to ue j2me-cdc apps to bridge the gap and thus the rel reason for the 350 hires.
The d-bus browser plugins wil be open sourced this next week by Movial.
LIMO and someother Linux groups are planning to incorporate the d-bus plugins into Mobile Linux OS distros in a fast manner and thus are poised ot beat Moto..
wow very interesting
http://www.diar...roid-phone.html
The Motorola Android Phone: The perfect phone for guys who like to show off their crotch, women who think they’re in musicals, people who are really proud of their palms, and black guys who think they’re John Travolta.
What can go wrong?