Motorola preps Android "social smartphone"

Over the last couple of months, Motorola has been showing to carriers a bunch of specs and pictures of a touchscreen phone based on the Android platform. The phone will apparently take some of the design cues from the “Krave” (pictured above) which was released in the States last week.

The handset will feature a touchscreen about the same size as the iPhone, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and a focus on social networking features. That could well include the .tel domain that we talked about last week.

People who’ve seen the spec-sheets describe it as a higher-end version of the G1, at a lower price. Now that’s fighting talk! The focus on social networking features will be interesting – hopefully it’ll extend further than the current “go to the Facebook website” features on current mobile phones, but stop short of a dedicated “poke” button on the phone itself.

Motorola won’t have this out till Q2 2009, and that means it won’t likely show up here till Q3 2009, but maybe this time next year we’ll have something from Motorola to be excited about for a change.

Motorola Krave (via BusinessWeek)

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