In the struggle for supremacy over the mobile markets, Google has an advantage over Apple. While Steve Jobs' empire has dispatched both its hardware and software teams on the mighty iPhone, Google has simply provided developers with the powerful new Android mobile OS.
T-Mobile built the first Android phone, and now Motorola has its sights set on the second quarter of 2009 for the release of the Android Social Smart Phone.
Although Motorola hasn't confirmed any details about this new device on the record, online reports indicate that the company plans to incorporate powerful social-networking access into this new phone.
"The phone will appear among a new class of social smartphones designed to make it easy for users to connect quickly and easily to mobile social networks such as Facebook and MySpace," BusinessWeek's Olga Kharif said. "Such phones let users message in-network friends directly from phone contact lists, for example."
Like T-Mobile's G1 Android Phone, Motorola's Android Social Smart Phone will have a touchscreen and a retractable keyboard. According to TechCrunch, the Social Smart Phone should resemble Motorola's Krave mobile phone.
Tech writer Erick Schonfeld noted that the iPhone and G1 Android-based phone can both access Facebook and MySpace in multiple ways, and that Motorola is going for something different.
"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," he said. "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."