T-Mobile announced the upcoming availability of the Motorola Cliq with Motoblur, the first Android-powered device from Motorola. The handset?s open approach may make it a formidable force in the industry.

Apple?s launch of the iPhone has been a great success and the industry has seen many wannabes since. Will the Cliq position Motorola as a big player in the smartphone market?

?The evolution and adoption of phones and applications is simple and the money follows the curve ? size of user base, ease to develop applications, ability to make money ? be it price of applications or through advertising,? said Paran Johar, chief marketing officer of Jumptap, New York.  

?Right now the iPhone is hot and No. 1,? he said. ?BlackBerry has the most handsets, but the app store hasn?t really taken off. Google is two years behind but their open approach coupled with Google?s reach and advertising model could make it a formidable challenger.

?However, the established big players are not always the ones to win in a new category, as evidenced by Google?s slow progress in mobile advertising. As for Motorola, don?t count them out of the game yet.?

Developed by Motorola, Motoblur manages and integrates communications ? from work email to social networking activity ? on the handset. Updates to contacts, posts, messages and photos are streamed together and synced from sources such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Gmail and work and personal email.

Motoblur automatically delivers these updates to the home screen in easy-to-view streams so there is no need to open and close different mobile applications to keep up with the latest content.

?Cliq is the first phone to feature Motoblur, and the result of Motorola?s focus on delivering new and authentic experiences that leverage Google?s open Android platform," said Juli Burda, spokeswoman at Motorola, Schaumburg, IL. 

A 3G-capable smartphone featuring a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a full touch-screen display, the Cliq is designed to keep the conversation moving, enabling fast messaging and easy navigation through Motoblur?s streams and widgets.

The Cliq expands T-Mobile?s lineup of Android devices and underscores the carrier?s commitment to the open, customizable Android platform.

This continued first-mover advantage with Android lets T-Mobile customers have access to the Android Market.

?This is an important phone for Motorola as it tries to regain the momentum it has lost over the past couple of years,? said Neil Strother, analyst at Forrester Research, Kirkland, WA.  ?But it?s not the only one, since it has other Android-powered phones coming out soon.

?For Google, it?s a boost for Android as it adds a major handset maker to those already producing phones with the OS,? he said. ?And more people using Android phones helps drive mobile usage of Gmail and search, and other Google services.

?For Apple, not sure this changes much, since the market has many competitors and this is not an unexpected move.?

The Cliq delivers a reliable mobile Web experience via T-Mobile?s 3G network and WiFi.

Additional Cliq features include a 3.1-inch HVGA touch-screen display, a 5 megapixel auto focus camera with video capture and playback at 24 frames per second, a 3.5mm headset jack, a music player with preloaded Amazon MP3 store application, Shazam, iMeem Mobile, and a pre-installed 2GB microSD memory card with support for up to 32 GB of removable memory.

The 18-24 demographic is likely to gravitate to this smartphone because they spend the majority of their daily Internet time within a variety of social networking applications.

Quattro Wireless believes that the new smartphone does have a chance to make inroads in the enterprise market as well with its enterprise email capabilities.

A device such as this could very well end up being the sole mobile device for many users across both work and personal lives.

Quattro Wireless serves ads on Android devices and the audience is very responsive to advertising.

Rich media units, such as expandable banners, can be served to Android applications as well as iPhone.

In fact, data from the Quattro Network shows that ads in Android applications drive click rates more than six times higher than what advertisers achieve from online advertising.

Both brand and direct advertisers have seen great results in targeting advertising to consumers in the applications they are really engaged with on all smartphone platforms, including Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm Pre.

With another Android phone on the market, brands and advertisers are sure to become even more interested in getting their message out in front of this demographic.

?Motorola is smart to not just release another Android device, and instead focus on a dynamic user experience and take advantage of the huge interest in, and usage of,  social networking on mobile devices with its social-aggregation Motoblur platform,? said Eswar Priyadarshan, Waltham, MA-based chief technology officer of Quattro Wireless.