Wirefly is offering the Cliq XT Titanium for free with a 2-year contract/data plan. Cliq XT has no physical keyboard, LED flash 5 megapixel camera, FM radio tuner, and touch-sensitive trackpad. 3.1″ touchscreen, MotoBLUR (based on Android 1.5), 802.11 Wi-fi, and A2DP Bluetooth. It’s a decent phone that didn’t get a lot of hype. If you know somebody up for upgrade on T-Mo, or somebody looking for a free entry-level smartphone that you’d like to turn onto Android, this is a damn good start.
All the way at the other end of Motorola’s line is the upcoming Droid X. It’s going to be huge in size and power and I’m going to go up to New York next week to get in on the launch event. Bear in mind, they didn’t invite me this time even though I’ve gone to the launch of two other Motorola Android devices this year and Sanjay Jha is my bro. I emailed them today, though…so I should be covering it quite thoroughly when they get back to me. …And with my newfound love for instant YouTube videos, I’ll have tons of hands-on video of it.
The particularly funny thing about the Droid X ad above is that it’s INCORRECT. The Droid X absolutely does not have an HD screen. It can capture HD video, but that’s different.
Android 2.1 with HTC Sense
600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor
512MB ROM/384MB RAM
3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen (320×480)
5-megapixel camera
2GB microSD card included
Dimensions 4.1″ x 2.3″ x .46″
Weight (with battery): 3.8 ounces
Battery: 1200mAh
Quadband EDGE (850/900/1800/1900), dual band HSPA (850/1900)
Digital compass, WiFi, aGPS, HSPA 7.2
Available on June 20, $129.99 after $100 mail-in rebate and 2 year contract.
It kind of reminds me of the HD Mini which didn’t end up coming to the states. I’ll ping HTC in a minute to see if they’re gonna give out more info.
Tim Bray has joined the Android team at Google, so get used to him speaking for the platform.
The 55 year old co-creator of the XML standard left Sun and picked up at Google this week, and explained in his blog some of the reasons why he chose Google over a company like Apple.
In short, he thinks Android is the place to be, and had this to say about the iPhone:
“The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.
I hate it.
I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.
The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.
Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.
I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.
The tragedy is that Apple builds some great open platforms; I’ve been a happy buyer of their computing systems for some years now and, despite my current irritation, will probably go on using them.”
I don’t think I’m alone in giving this a big round of applause.
“Sterile” …what a good word to describe iPhone.
I too am a daily Mac user who has absolutely no interest in the iPhone. It’s simply not exciting (the goddamn iPad just serves to remind me how boring the platform is) despite the elegant hardware and snappy interface. It’s so uniform and uninspiring and STERILE. Nobody goes “Wow, is that an iPhone?” anymore. Nobody. Because once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, and they’ve been the same for three years now.
My peer group is increasingly being overtaken by Android devices, and any time someone pulls out their phone, there’s a conversation between them about different facets of the platform, UIs, apps, and future developments. It’s a more inclusive environment not only to OEMs and developers, but also to users.
It’s funny that ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn said “This beat is about to get a lot more fun” now that Tim Bray is involved, because I always thought it was the most exciting area in all of mobile technology.
Maybe it just takes someone of his stature to make people believe it.
Motorola just announced another new device, the MotoROI.
We’ve had the MotoRAZR, MotoROKR, MotoRIZR…but, MotoROI? what the fuck does that even mean?
I laughed when I first saw it because we commonly encounter ROI in venture capitalist blogs and such as “return on investment,” which would be kind of hilarious in Motorola’s case…it’s effectively investing everything in the Android platform, and this is what we get. Is that really what they’re going for here?
If his device ran Android 1.6, it would have been perfectly named MoTOROID!
Seriously though, I’m looking for what they’re going for in Korean. There’s a popular Korean site called “Roiworld” which has fashion games for little girls and shit. I’m having trouble because 저는 한국말 잘못 해요 and pretty much the only things I know in Korean end in a “da” or a “yo.”
