Motorola today announced the upcoming availability of Motorola Charm, a touch screen smartphone with a BlackBerry form factor aimed at the social networking set. The Charm is expected to be available later this summer exclusively from T-Mobile USA.
According to a press release, the Charm runs Android 2.1 with Motorola’s Motoblur UI. The phone also features Backtrack, a navigation pad, which is located on the back of the smartphone directly behind the home screen, which is similar to a laptop touch panel for screen navigation.
The Charm comes equipped with a 2.8-inch touch screen, full qwerty keyboard, touch screen, 3-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and support for Adobe Flash.
“Being social with friends and family comes naturally for T-Mobile customers, and we think mobilizing their social experiences should be effortless,” said Saj Sahay, director of product management, T-Mobile USA, in a statement. “With the new Motorola Charm and enhancements to the Android and Motoblur experience, we’re bringing more social skills to our broad portfolio of Android-powered smartphones,”
Motorola has done some tweaking to its social-centric Motoblur UI, which aggregates status information from a number of social networks, such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. Filters can now be selected from a single social networking account, contacts, group or messaging account so that users can select only the information they want to stream live to the Happenings and Messages widgets.
Users also can move and resize pre-loaded home screen widgets to personalize up to seven home screen panels. Consumers also can manage their phone’s battery consumption by selecting different power modes to conserve battery.
The Charm launches in the wake of Microsoft’s public axing of its Kin One and Two devices, which were aimed at much of the same social-networking teen set that the Charm appears geared towards. Microsoft said that it canceled the phones in order to put more focus on the company’s new Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system.
