Remember when Motorola told everyone that they wanted to spin off that lame-o mobile division of theirs? Still hasn't happened! Motorola isn't depending on the Cliq to revive their phone business; they're depending on it to ditch their phone business.
Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha practically said as much, in a strangely frank interview on CNBC:
There's a lot of talk about "the long road ahead" and plenty of admissions of guilt, as far as Moto's poor product choices over the last few years, but when our old pal Jim Goldman straight up asks him when the mobile division is going to move out of its parents' basement (at about 6:10), Jha shows his cards.
He seems to see two paths: A world where people love Motorola smartphones again, where demand for smartphones in general is up, and where credit markets are stabilized; or, a world where someone like Dell just buys them up, and everyone lives happily ever after. As you can see in the video, only one of these possibilities makes him smile. If that's the plan, though, they might need to step up their PR game a little bit, by which I mean a lot.
What I'm trying to say is, the Cliq is basically a midlife crisis boob job, for Motorola.[CNBC—Thanks, Jimmy1!]