Moto Dext for Orange, N900 Maemo for anyone – official

Orange UK have snaffled up the long-awaited Motorola Morrison (aka Dext or Cliq) and as Phandroid reports, will ship in October. Rumoured to be priced at around 150 Euros, this QWERTY keyboard slider runs Android and that’s a good reason to get excited. The world needs to see more devices running Android.

According to Motorola’s marketing blurb about the UI, Moto Blur, this is the first mobile with ‘Social Skills.’  From the press release pics, a cynic might believe that all this means is that Facebook and Twitter have been crammed onto the Idle screen, but actually this is a services-oriented play, like Nokia’s Ovi, with online Contacts back-up, email etc. [I must say, the Blur logo looks a little bit too much like the logo of a well-know Brit-pop band who enjoyed particular success in the late nineties...hmm.]

As well as supplying Orange in UK and France, Motorola have successfully sold the Dext/Cliq to T-Mobile in the USA, Telefonica in Spain and America Movil in Latin America, so there should be some smiley faces at Motorola for once.

For anyone following the Nokia N900 release, palpitations pulsed last week when Reuters announced that the Maemo device (that’s Linux folks) would not be made available to Mobile Network Operators. Hah! We cried, at last Nokia is going to change the game but unfortunately, it was all just a dream and Nokia have now clarified matters for us mere mortals: yes, any operator is welcome to take the N900 and ship it with whatever bizarre crippleware they want in order to ’suit their needs.’  That’s right, their needs, not yours.

Don’t forget: It’s your mobile. www.mo-call.com