Every year the National Basketball Association honors only six individual players with annual awards. Along with the Most Valuable Player, Defensive Player of the Year, and the Rookie of the Year, the NBA awards the Most Improved Player Award (formerly known as the Comeback Player of the Year). As the name implies, the award is given to the player that has made the largest single season improvement in play. For example, in the 2007-2008 season Hedo Turkoglu scored and rebounded well above his career average to earn the honor…and then the next season helped to lead his team to the NBA Championship Series.
In professional basketball, with its hundreds of players, it is not difficult to find a handful of players whose intense focus and renewed work ethic propel their game; however, in the wireless phone realm, this type of reinvention is difficult to come by. Yet with the release of its first two Android-based Smartphones this week, Motorola is putting its name in the hat for the Most Improved Player of the Year.
On November 2nd Motorola will release its T-Mobile device the Cliq. The Cliq’s claim to fame is the MotoBlur service that is built on top of the Android platform. MotoBlur is a service that helps to aggregate content, and is particularly useful in managing multiple social networks, by putting all of the information you determine you want on the desktop. I have been testing this device for a couple weeks, and it highlighted just how inconvenient it was with my previous phones to search through news stories or view Facebook status updates. The Cliq will be available at $148 with either a new agreement or qualified upgrade.
Then, the mystery is solved on Friday, November 6th with the launch of the Verizon Droid. As you have most likely seen, the positioning of the Droid has been targeted at the current king of iconic devices. The Droid has been built with the latest version of Android that enables some pretty cool functions like Text-to-Speech navigation with Google maps. In addition to the software enhancements, the hardware on the Droid is top notch as well – sporting a 5 megapixel camera, a full physical keyboard, and a 3.7” hi-res display. The Droid will be available at $198 with either a new agreement or qualified upgrade.
With the anticipated strong performance this week, I am adding Motorola to my Phone League Fantasy Team!