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Motorola injected significant, and much needed, new confidence in its handset strategy, when it launched its first Android phones last fall. In particular, its perceived return from the wilderness was driven by Verizon Wireless' powerful support for the Droid smartphone. The carrier, keen to compensate for its lack of an iPhone by expanding its smartphone range around Android, put hefty efforts behind the Droid.

But then HTC came along. The Taiwanese vendor had supplied the second in the Verizon Droid line-up, the Droid Eris, which performed respectably but was outshone in marketing terms by the Motorola device. Then the tables turned when it was chosen to provide the top end and new flagship for the Droid brand, the Incredible, one of the rising tide of gigahertz, large-screen superphones. This has left Motorola struggling to catch up, and although it plans its own gigahertz handset for Verizon this summer, it may not ship until September.

That will give HTC a headstart of almost four months in the gigahertz race, within the Verizon stable - for the smartphone market as a whole, that leadtime is longer, since HTC has been offering the Android Desire and the Windows Mobile HD2 for several months already. Both are gigahertz phones, similarly spec'd to the CDMA Incredible (as are Sprint's WiMAX/CDMA EVO, and of course the Google-badged Nexus One).

Motorola, to be fair, has been rolling out plenty of Android models in the past nine months, with a range of well differentiated designs such as the Backflip for AT&T and several Chinese phones. It has released a total of eight Android smartphones (some basically variations on a theme) this year so far and aims to launch another 12 before 2010 is over. This is giving the US vendor some of its old scale and reach in the smartphone mainstream, and the ability to tweak models to suit different markets or carriers. But the desirable and headline grabbing phones this summer, apart from the new iPhone, are the gigahertz products and Motorola needs to provide a top end for its line-up.

This will come in the shape of the Droid Shadow for Verizon (and a more generic variation for the GSM market). Unlike the Droid, with its Qwerty keyboard, Shadow will be all-touch (though there will also be an upgrade for the Qwerty device, Droid 2, in the fall). The Shadow is expected to resemble the HTC big hitters with a Snapdragon processor, 4.1-inch FWVGA touchscreen and Android 2.2, if that is ready. It will beat most smartphones on the camera front, with 8-megapixels and HD video, and there will be 8Gb of internal storage plus 8Gb microSD card.

The trouble with playing catch-up is it gets harder to be noticed. Motorola will have to negotiate hard to ensure this gets a similar level of commitment from Verizon as the Incredible, or the original Droid - on which Verizon reportedly spent $100m in marketing funds. With the gigahertz market filling up - Acer joined this week too, Samsung is on its way - a handset needs strong operator promotion to stand out from the crowd. Speaking at an investor conference, Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha expressed confidence that the Verizon relationship would hold strong. "We will introduce new Droid products in the Verizon franchise," he said, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, though he gave no more details.

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