The phone, to be called the Motorola Cliq and offered exclusively on T-Mobile in the US, and the Motorola Dext in Europe, features 3G, WiFi, a 3.1 inch touch screen, slide-out landscape keyboard, and 5 megapixel camera, amongst its specs.

The big sell, however, is the new UI that Motorola has built on top of Android and an accompanying synchronization and backup service, both dubbed Motoblur. The combined offering “is the first and only solution to sync contacts, posts, messages, photos and much more—from sources such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Gmail, work and personal e-mail, and LastFM—and automatically deliver it to the home screen”. Or so the company claims.

If that all sounds similar to the custom Android work that HTC have recently done with the HTC Hero or Palm’s Synergy, or to a lesser extent, Nokia’s home screen widget approach on the N97 or much of the overall philosophy behind handset upstart INQ, it’s because it is. While Motorola are probably onto something with Motoblur, so is much of the rest of the industry.

The social web, as I’ve argued many times before, is the killer app for mobile data. And Motorola just bet the house on it.

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Related Articles at last100:

• Video: Android 2.0’s cloud-savvy address book and more
• First impressions of the HTC Hero (widgets, web browser, and social networking)
• Three things that I hate about Android #fail
• Review: Motorola Milestone (Droid)
• Weekly wrapup: Internet TV widgets, iPlayer PS3 upgrade, Moto’s social networking play, Palm Pre hands-on, Spotify hits iPhone/Android, Nokia E55 review, and more