Motorola on Thursday officially introduced its first Google Android device: the Motorola Dext.
The announcement of the Dext, which is known as the Cliq in North America, was made by Motorola's co-chief executive Sanjay Jha at the Mobilize 09 conference in San Francisco. Jha demonstrated the smartphone, long-rumoured as the Morrison, at the event.
The Motorola Dext will go on sale in the UK in October exclusively through Orange. It will be free with a £35-a-month contract that lasts 24 months, an Orange spokesman told ZDNet UK.
In the US, T-Mobile will offer the phone in two colours, titanium or winter white, when it becomes available later this autumn. Pricing was not revealed. It will be sold worldwide in 2010 as the Motorola Dext, the company said.
Motorola said it would announce a second Android phone in the coming weeks.
Jha demonstrated the T-Mobile USA version, the Cliq, which measures 4.49 inches tall by 2.28 inches wide by 0.62 inch thick and weighs 5.6 ounces. It features a 3.1-inch HVGA touchscreen with a 320x480 pixel resolution and has a slide-out Qwerty keyboard as well as a soft keyboard. It is also equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The phone will run Android 1.5 Cupcake and offer access to Google's various services, including Google Maps with Street View, Google Voice Search, Picasa and GTalk.
The smartphone supports a number email clients, such as Yahoo, Windows Live and other POP3 and Imap services, and syncs with Microsoft Exchange, including calendar. The QuickOffice Suite is also onboard for document viewing.
The quadband Cliq is 3G-capable and offers a full HTML Google browser, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. Multimedia features come in the form of a five-megapixel camera with video-recording capabilities and a built-in music and video player.
The smartphone also comes preloaded with the Amazon MP3 Store, a dedicated YouTube app, Shazam, Last.fm and Imeem. Rated talk time is six hours and up to 13.5 days of standby time.
Motorola hopes its Motoblur user interface will help differentiate the Cliq from the rest of the smartphone pack. As discussed in the keynote on Thursday, Motoblur syncs information from different sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and a user's personal and work email accounts, and automatically streams updates to your home screen.
The idea behind this is that the constant stream of information will mean users have to spend less time opening and closing applications.
