Rumored Moto-Andriod may mean trouble for FruitPhone

Is stodgy old Moto about to upset the ever thinning Mr. Job’s Apple cart? Will the Death Star start playing the field with other handsets while still in its FruitPhone marriage? Only the Andriod knows for sure.

Signs are very good that a hot new Motorola Android phone will go to market before mid 2009. With an uncertain economy and large potential for maket share erosion at AT&T, the company will have no choice but to embrace a hot new handset that is as capable is the FruitPhone, cheaper then the new HTC and much more social. That could spell trouble for Apple and rescue Moto from the grave. It could also signal the beginning of the smart phone price war that could bring their cost into Tightwad territory.

According to BusinessWeek, Motorola is putting $50 million into its Android project, which is being run by a team from Good Technology, a mobile e-mail company that Motorola bought in 2006. The first phone won’t come out until the second quarter of next year, it will have a touch screen like the iPhone and a slide-out keyboard like the HTC T-Mobile G1 launching on Wednesday, but will look more like the Motorola Krave. It is also expected to be cheaper than the G1’s $180 price.

But how will it tie into existing social networks? Already, the G1 imports your contacts from Gmail into the phone. 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. 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. (TechCrunch)