Motorola Blaze, Verizon's First Touchscreen Moto

It seems that Motorola is going into the touchscreen direction with more and more of its handset. After the two Mings (A1600 and A1800) and the A810 - all three released in China - we have another Moto-made touchscreen phone, named Motorola Blaze.

The Blaze was recently spotted at Boy Genius Report, coming in a clamshell form factor not too different from the one the above-mentioned Ming handsets come in. But while the A1600 and A1800 are China-bound, the Blaze will be available in the US, via Verizon Wireless. There's no official info yet to sustain this, but since the new Moto comes with Verizon's logo and a Verizon user interface (we can see these in the available images), it's obvious that, sometime in the near future, the second largest US carrier will include the Blaze in its product line-up.

Motorola Blaze looks pretty weird, much like the A1600 and A1800 Ming handsets. When closed, the Blaze appears simplistic, while when flipped it unveils a pretty large touchscreen display (its exact size, resolution and number of colors are not known for the moment). BGR says that the virtual keyboard of the Blaze is far from being user-friendly, but this might be fixed by the time the official version of the device is released.

The features of Blaze include: built-in GPS, EV-DO Rev A. connectivity for fast data transfer speeds, a 2 Megapixel camera with video recording, mobile TV capabilities and Bluetooth. Plus, the clamshell will almost surely feature Verizon applications like V CAST Music and V CAST Video.

All in all, Moto's new Blaze is surely interesting and if its overall functionality proves to be a good one, then Verizon might have gotten itself a successful phone. No word yet on a release date or a possible price, but these details should be available in the next few months or even weeks.