The Short Names

The world’s third-largest computer company will start selling its first mobile phone next month through China Mobile, the country’s biggest wireless carrier. The phone, called the Dell Mini 3, runs Google’s Android and has no keyboard and a touch screen. It will also not have wi-fi to comply with government regulations.

Dell also said it will be available in Brazil later this year, but did not mention when it would launch a phone in the U.S. with AT&T (NYSE: T). In China, the Mini 3 will be part of China Mobile’s forthcoming OPhone line, which will compete against the iPhone being sold exclusively by China Unicom. Dell’s relationship with China Mobile first kicked off through selling subsidized netbooks with cellular data plans. Michael Tatelman, VP of sales and marketing for Dell’s global consumer business, told AP that Dell wants carriers to have some control over the phone, which is why it choose the flexible Android platform. As Michael Dell said previously, Tatelman confirmed the company still hasn’t ruled out making phones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.

Deutsche Telekom (NYSE: DT) is considering acquiring Sprint (NYSE: S), the third-largest U.S. carrier in a bid to fix T-Mobile USA, its ailing U.S. wireless business. Sources told the UK’s Telegraph that Deutsche Telekom may submit a bid within the next few weeks.

The company has apparently hired an investment bank to consider the offer, which closely follows the decision to merge with its struggling T-Mobile UK business with Orange to create Britain’s biggest mobile phone firm. DT’s two ailing wireless units have been a top priority of CEO René Obermann, who blames them for contributing to the company’s €1.1bn first-quarter loss. Currently, Sprint is valued at about $10.6 billion (£6.3 billion), and DT has a value of £36.3 billion ($60.5 billion).

Together, T-Mobile USA and Sprint would roughly make the second-largest U.S. carrier, but would be a disjointed hodgepodge of at least three different network technologies (not to mention Sprint’s minority stake in Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR), which has chosen WiMax as its 4G technology, rather than LTE, which DT has picked). Additionally, both are struggling to compete with AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) on the high-end and discount carriers on the low-end. The deal would also likely face scrutiny from regulators since it would be narrowing the field from four competitors to three at a time when the U.S. is investigating the telecom industry’s best practices.

Motorola’s biggest success to date was when it released the thinnest and sexiest device the world had seen. Since then, the handset-maker has struggled to produce anything like it.

Yesterday, everyone was prepared to see Motorola’s latest form factor that would bring it back from the brink. Instead, what we got was an announcement about an innovative new user interface, or skin, that runs on top of the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android operating system. In fact, the big unveiling had little to do with the hardware, and in many ways, the upcoming CLIQ phone looks like any smartphone with a slide-out Qwerty keyboard. The interesting stuff is the Blur technology running under the hood.

This marks a huge cultural shift for the company, which in the past has always been driven by hardware design. While we didn’t get the entire story, the picture we gleaned during yesterday’s announcement and during a hands-on demo showed that much of transformation had to do with new Motorola (NYSE: MOT) management—and leveraging assets the company already had.

When Sanjay Jha was appointed CEO of mobile devices, he fast tracked a project being worked on by former employees from Good Technology, an enterprise email service that Motorola acquired, and then sold off in February. So, while other divisions back in Illinois were slashing staff, the Sunnyvale office was quietly picking up employees from Apple and Google in what has become a long two and a half year process to get to market. Rick Osterloh, Motorola’s VP of Product Development for Android Products, couldn’t help but talk about the project, which had been kept under tight wraps for the past year so well. He said it originated with Jha, who was interested in what the former Good employees were working on. “He liked what he saw and he gave it resources.”

Jha explained the importance of BLUR to GigaOm’s Om Malik at Mobilize and how it compares to Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry. He said the platform melds Apple’s idea of having access to tons of applications with BlackBerry’s niche of integrating the apps—like email—deeply into the phone. Together, they have the apps and the integration: “The iPhone has one, BlackBerry has the other, but we have combined them in a meaningful way for social networking.”

Essentially, the BLUR technology enables users to get all of their messages, status updates and other social networking components pushed to them. Motorola’s director of product marketing Dan Rudolph told me during a demo at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art that in order to accomplish this, there’s a lot of server-side technologies playing a role. All of the messages are compressed and then sent to the device. The process should help save on bandwidth and battery life, while the consumer will have all the information without having to go out and retrieve it.

Osterloh said the original idea stretches back as far as 2007 when Facebook and MySpace were just taking off. “We had all these people from Good…we thought we could really solve something.” He said the two keys were that messaging services on devices had gotten complicated. (Users had multiple email addresses and also SMS and MMS.) The other thing they looked at was making a consumer-friendly service that would be used by people who didn’t have support from an IT staff at work. “We redid everything. It was focused on business and this is 100 percent focused on the consumer.”

Some of the key services include an online portal, where users could log in and manage their device. If it’s lost, they can ping it and see where it’s located on a map. If it’s been stolen, they can wipe off all of their information and data. Likewise, if you get a new phone, all you would have to do is re-enter a BLUR user name and password and all of the consumer’s settings and preferences would be restored from the wallpaper to which widgets it has on the home screen—a significant time saver. Osterloh: “There was a big hole between what was happening with applications and what was happening with services on the BlackBerry. We see that there’s a need for both…The strategic part is the BLUR part.”

Motorola’s strong software platform may have increased its chances of making a comeback. But form factor is important, too. And, so far, it’s something that’s been neglected on the Google Android platform. To date, most of the devices are bulky, and while some have gotten sleeker, nothing still compares to the iPhone. Motorola’s new CLIQ also falls into this category. While solid and full of the latest hardware, it too is large and strays from Moto’s design background. INQ Mobile’s CEO Frank Meehan announced yesterday that his company was going to start building phones on Google Android’s OS, but pointed to one of the challenges with the platform: “Currently, Android phones on networks that are selling against the iPhone have not performed well. You need to get the experience better.”

So far, Motorola has announced that its first handsets will be sold via T-Mobile in the U.S. and also Orange, Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) and America Movil. How will it do? We’ll have to wait and see.

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Japan-based NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) has offered to buy net mobile, a Germany-based mobile content distribution company. DoCoMo said it will offer EUR 6.35 ($9.28) a share in cash for all outstanding shares, which represents a 53.9 percent premium over the three-month average share. Based on the 6.55 million shares issued as of March 31, the offer is worth about 41.6 million euros ($60.80 million), Reuters reports.

In a release, Masatoshi Suzuki, a senior executive and DoCoMo board member said they are attracted to net mobile because it is steadily expanding its business in Europe. Suzuki: “Net mobile’s technology and European presence are major plus points for DOCOMO, which is strengthening the foundation of its mobile platform business overseas.”

Earlier this week, DoCoMo Capital invested in Evernote, and in June, DoCoMo bought a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, the San Diego-based mobile video and software company.