Motorola Devour to turn up at Verizon in March, probably at $99

After a good reception for its first two Android phones, Droid/Milestone and Cliq/Dext, Motorola plans about 20 more this year. It has unleashed Backflip, plus models for China and Korea, and next will come the scarily named Devour.

This will be a midrange smartphone in the same ball park as Cliq, but with a Qwerty keyboard as well as touchscreen. In fact, it will really be a cutdown version of the Droid, following the common trend of offering a ‘diffusion line’ for high end phones, with reduced price and spec sheet, and hitting the shelves a couple of months after the original (Samsung Galaxy Lite, Nokia N97 Mini and so on ...)

The big difference from Droid, apart from lower end display, memory and camera, will be that the Devour will have the Motoblur user interface, heavily geared to social networking. Droid sported a more vanilla Google look and feel but it seems Motorola will dump this during 2010, and put Motoblur on all its Android phones (and possibly Windows ones in future). This emulates HTC, whose Sense overlay is meant to differentiate its phones and brand, and cover up the less appealing aspects of Android and Windows. Later in the year, Motoblur will gain more advanced multimedia functionality including 3D and augmented reality features.

These will not turn up in time for the first Devour, but it still promises to be a neat, affordable phone. Assuming Motorola sticks to recent patterns, it will appear in Europe a month or so after its US launch (scheduled for March), with a different brand name and, of course, GSM support.

Across the pond, the Devour will shed the ‘Droid’ naming convention that Verizon adopted for its first two Android handsets, the Motorola phone and the HTC Droid Eris. The handset will run Android 1.6, rather than the newer release 2.0 of its big brother, and sport midrange specifications, lower than Droid’s. Its 3.1-inch capacitive touchscreen is smaller, with only 320 x 480 resolution, the camera is 3-megapixels and there is an 8Gb microSD card rather than the Droid’s 16Gb.

On the device's front, next to the touchscreen, will be three touch sensitive buttons and an optical trackpad, rather than a trackball or the Droid’s D-pad. The phone will have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, plus 3.5 mm headset jack, GPS receiver, and a microSD memory card slot.

Pricing has not been announced yet but is expected to be around $99 to $149 after subsidy, which would target it at the mass market.

Originally, the Devour – once codenamed Calgary - was supposed to be Verizon’s first Android phone, rather than the Droid, and when it didn’t turn up it was widely assumed that it had not won the carrier’s heart and Motorola had returned to the drawing board – also said to have happened at AT&T.