Motorola introduces Android phone

San Francisco: Motorola introduced its first smartphone based on Google's Android software Thursday, in a move that's key to the company's goal of regaining its place among the world's top cellphone manufacturers.

The device, dubbed the Cliq, will first be made available later this year in the U.S. through T-Mobile. The touch-screen phone will run a new service from Motorola called MotoBlur, which synchronises all user messages and contacts, Motorola chief executive Sanjay Jha said at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

"MotoBlur makes text, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter feeds and photos from sources like MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo and corporate e-mail appear in a single stream and sync them together with no different logins," Jha said. "This means you can focus on what people have said instead of how and where they said it."

The Cliq will feature a full, slide-out keyboard, a 5-megapixel camera and access to all the Google programmes and applications available for the company's Android platform.