Wall Street (Hearts) Moto’s Cliq

Taking its cue from gadget geeks, who gave mostly thumbs-ups to the new Cliq handset, Wall Street has showered Motorola, an investor pariah just a year ago, with love this week.

Motorola shares were up nearly 7.5 percent in late-Friday trading after enjoying a boost from the new smartphone, based on the Android operating system from Google Inc.(GOOG), introduced yesterday at the Mobilize 09 conference in San Francisco. Battered the last few years by lackluster handset sales and investor perceptions that it had fallen behind rivals Research in Motion(RIMM) and Apple(AAPL) in the mobile device wars, Motorola has seen its shares rise 32 percent in the last two months.

Wall Street analysts were positively gushy in their praise of the new slide-out Cliq. “We see today’s announcement as a milestone in Motorola’s turnaround,” wrote Brian Modoff of Deutsche Bank (as quoted on Barron’s Tech Trader Daily blog). “Motorola is carving out a niche in the crowded smartphone market,” echoed Mark Sue of RBC Capital, “by focusing on socially minded demographics as opposed to enterprise users or pro-sumers.”

The Cliq sports the new MotoBlur user interface, which gathers messages and updates from diverse communications and social networking services and displays them on a customizable home screen in the form of “thought bubbles” (actually Andoid widgets). Specifically targeted at heavy users of Facebook, Twitter, et al, the phone marks the first of a series of Android-based smartphones planned by Motorola for 2010.