There is news about a new Motorola device called ‘LaJolla’. The first thing to be said is Android and Me seem to have been quite careful in posting this information, so as to avoid any backlash for putting up false hope. This is the good news. The bad news is that a lot of detail is still very speculative and should be considered as such. So let us take a look at what they’ve come up with.

Motorola have recently released the source code for the CLIQ. Burried within was reference to devices that married up with the leaked Motorola road-map, such as the Morrison (CLIQ), Motus, and Zeppelin. What we hadn’t heard about before was ‘La Jolla’. Motorola are based in California and have a number of offices in San Diego, especially in a small town called ‘La Jolla’, which also means ‘the jewel’ in Spanish. I have tried to independently verify this, and it would certainly appear correct. A number of other phone related companies do also, including Cingular Wireless. On the back of some digging by Android and Me, the following specifications appear likely.

• Qualcomm 7201A Processor (528 MHz ARM11)
• MAX7359 Keypad
• Kionix 3-axis accelerometer driver for LaJolla board.
• Motorola Halo i2c touchscreen (240 x 400)

The company has been struggling recently – Motorola simply failed to innovate and capitalize on the smartphone boom after the RAZR’s blockbuster success in the mid-2000’s. It’s last chance, most believe, lays with the Android platform. And things are looking good for Moto.

The low-end handset market is far larger than the market for headlining smartphones like the Motorola DROID. Samsung and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) know this all too well – they make a killing selling cheap mobile phones to people in emerging and still-developing markets. Sure, there’s more glory in launching a handset that will capture global attention, but the bread-and-butter is in cheap phones. To that end, Motorola has made it clear that they want cheap Android phones on market by 2011.