Motorola plans to open up APIs for Motoblur, the social networking software on its new Android phone

Motorola plans to open up APIs for Motoblur, said Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s co-CEO and CEO for mobile devices, in an interview after a presentation at the GigaOM Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

[ Last week, Motorola announced the Cliq, the company's first Android-based handset. | Get InfoWorld's 20-page hands-on look at the new generation of mobile devices, and see how the BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and more stack up against business needs, all from InfoWorld's editors and contributors. ]

“Over a period of time — we’re not there yet — we’ll allow the APIs to be available so people can develop many more applications than we can think of ourselves but it’ll take us a little bit of time to mature ourselves to a place that we could open up APIs,” Jha said.

Motoblur and Cliq were unveiled at the conference on Thursday. Motoblur synchronizes such activities as contacts, feeds, e-mails, messages, and photos from different sources including Facebook, Twitter, and corporate e-mail. Motorola calls the device “the first phone with social skills.”

Motoblur is based on the Google-backed Android platform for mobile systems. Motorola would offer an additional SDK for its APIs beyond what is available for Android, Jha said.

He acknowledged, however, that Motoblur is more geared to consumers and “prosumers” than the business application market. A prosumer is a non-professional who nonetheless uses their phone for work purposes.

“I think you we will see us address [the business] market with subsequent devices,” Jha said. Enterprise-level systems require different capabilities and Motorola is working on these types of units, said Jha.

During the conference, Jha cited context awareness as a capability that would become more critical in two years. “We have the ability to know what users want more and more as we interact with them more and more,” he said.

Other important factors for smartphones will be building of trust with consumers. Systems for health care, fitness and multimedia will become more critical as well, he said.

Google’s Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering, said moving the Web forward as a platform would be of importance in coming years. Services based on the HTML 5 specification, he said, will expand the base of developers for cell phone-based applications. [PC World]

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