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Earnings calls tend to be about as exciting as a stale piece of white bread, but every once in a while something juicy falls through — and morsels are filtering out of the earnings call that Motorola held this morning. Here are the biggies:

* We hope you like Blur, because it’s not going anywhere. CEO Sanjay Jha says that “the majority of our new smartphone [sic] this year will feature” the platform, and that it’ll “include enhancements to address the prosumer segment of the market.” They’re looking to rope in media (music, photos, and so on) the same way they did social networking, boost enterprise compatibility for white collar types that only have one phone, and improve network efficiency to ease up on battery drain. All good things, we reckon.
* Feature phones in Moto’s range will “meaningfully decline” as it heads toward planned profitability in the fourth quarter through higher-margin smartphones. Android isn’t the only game plan, though — it’ll continue to develop its ultra low-end handsets for emerging markets.
* Following the Nexus One’s lead, Jha said that it’ll launch “at least one direct-to-consumer device with Google.” That matches up nicely with a statement he made during our CES interview that “there will be multiple devices [launched through Google] and I think that we said ‘yes’ today that probably this next device is our device.”

All told, we have every reason to believe that this’ll be an exciting year for Moto fans — and that HTC needs to keep a close eye on these guys.

Now that the iPhone SDK seems to allow for 3G VoIP, it looks like the floodgates are beginning to open. Joining the ranks of iCall in this somewhat uncharted territory is Fring. Same deal as the previous one, the ability is already inherent in the current build, and now that the restriction has been lifted, users can simply place calls as they usually do through the service — yes, that includes Skype calls — only now not tethered to the nearest 802.11 cloud. As for the native Skype app, last we checked it was still not working. But it’s only a matter of time.

Will this phone ever stop surprising us? Rumblings that all HD2 devices have 576MB of RAM inside them started developing in China a little while before T-Mobile unveiled its upgraded US-bound handset with, funnily enough, the same amount of memory. Now, those trusty souls over at XDA-developers have concocted custom ROMs for everyone else to free up the extra 128MB of operational headroom, and user feedback appears to corroborate the theory. We can hardly begin to fathom the reasons for HTC disabling part of its available hardware, other than to guess that a WinMo 7 upgrade was in the company’s plans for this phone all along and it just wanted to keep its ability to handle the new OS under wraps.

We wouldn’t rate the ability to tune FM radio highly on our wishlist of missing features on Motorola’s CLIQ, but nonetheless an Android tweaker by the name of Eugene has figured out how to deliver it. The necessary receiving hardware for pulling down the Weekly Top 40 was actually there all the time, Eugene just needed some binary files — and to believe. Once he believed hard enough, clapped his hands, and copied over those files, presto he was groovin’. He hasn’t released a working version of his tweak to the world just yet, but we presume that will be coming soon enough.

While the news of Apple’s iPad having 3G wasn’t exactly a surprise, the move to a new format for the SIM certainly was. The SIM — that tiny card that holds your contact info and account information that you find in your GSM handset — is a 15 x 25mm plastic card whereas the new Micro SIM (also known as a 3FF SIM) is a diminutive 12 x 15mm, about 52% smaller. Needless to say, it’s not physically compatible with your current phone. This card was developed by the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) to offer things like more storage space on-chip for provider applications, increased control and security functions — over what, we don’t know — and the new smaller form factor allows it to fit in tiny devices. Frankly, we wouldn’t call the iPad “tiny” and we have absolutely no clue what justification Apple had to switch to it other than a desire to be different — this is the company that pioneered Mini DisplayPort, after all — but the long and the short of it is that you’re going to have a hard time finding a carrier offering Micro SIMs in the short term since the GSMA doesn’t appear to be actively spearheading a mass conversion. In fact, from AT&T’s perspective, this is better than a software lock in some ways — you’re not going to be able to download a hack that gets you on another network, so you’re totally at the mercy of your carrier at choice for providing a compatible card. Intentionally evil? Perhaps not — all standards have to start somewhere .

Great news for the VoIP world: iCall, the maker of the iCall VoIP iPhone app that can catch a GSM call and flip it over to WiFi, has issued a press release saying that the new iPhone SDK allows for VoIP over 3G cellular connections. Previously such calls had to be made over WiFi, since AT&T’s network (or someone well acquainted with AT&T’s network) didn’t think it was man enough to take the VoIP traffic. Interestingly, iCall says its 3G-friendly VoIP app is available now, and is the first and only such app in the App Store — which seems like some pretty quick turnaround on everyone’s part, but apparently the 3G restriction wasn’t anything to do with the software itself, but instead a server-side block. We just tested this out and it totally works, and while we’ll be looking for more verification that the ban has indeed been lifted, it sounds like it’s time for some cheaply connected international parties in the streets.

Like the camera references, this could just be another case of vestigial SDK weirdness — but for whatever reason, devs have noticed (and we’ve been able to reproduce) a “Touch to return to call” bar in the iPad emulator just like you’d expect to find on an iPhone during a traditional GSM call. It certainly seems like Steve would’ve bothered to mention during today’s festivities if you could do something crazy like pair up a Bluetooth headset and go to town (and you’d need a voice plan on top of that $29.99 data anyway), so who knows: either Apple’s just made every UI element as adaptable as possible regardless of whether it’s applicable to a particular device, they’re planning a higher-res iPhone down the road, or they’re integrating the bar into some VoIP action. Or… you know, none of the above.

Folks were a bit disappointed early on in the iPad announcement when it started to sound like it’d be WiFi only – but there was a twist! Late in the show, Steve Jobs announced that there will be 3G-enabled models. While Apple specifically named AT&T as the carrier who will offer up the 3G, he also stated that all iPads will be sold unlocked. It relies on GSM microSIMs – so while you’ll be able to take it around the world, don’t expect to take it over to Verizon or any other CDMA carrier.

The pricing of 3G through AT&T is a bit strange; you can pick up 250 Megabytes of data for the stupidly expensive price of $14.99, or unlimited data for the surprisingly cheap price of $30. There is no contract whatsoever. Alas, 3G support doesn’t come built into every model. Nothing in life is free, right? Gettin’ a 3G chip thrown in will set you back an additional $130 bucks – on the most expensive model, the 64GB edition, that brings the price up to $829. The 16 and 32 gigabyte models with 3G support will cost $629 and $729 respectively.

Alas, the 3G-enabled versions will take a bit longer to hit the shelves than their WiFi-only brethren; whereas the WiFi-only versions will be in stores within 60 days, Apple expects the 3G-friendly iPads to reach retail in 90.

Nokia has recently introduced the Nokia X6 16GB, a full touchscreen handset that has a 3.2-inch full touchscreen display in 16:9 ratio (360 x 640 pixels) and 16 million colors. Available in all black, all white, white with pink highlights and white with yellow highlights colors, the phone is powered by a 433.9MHz processor with a 5-megapixel camera with dual flash LED for low light photography, Bluetooth 2.0, a 3.5mm headphone jack, A-GPS and WLAN. The Nokia X6 16GB will be sold without the Come with Music service but will come with the latest Symbian S60 5th edition. Additionally, the phone comes equipped with a battery that provides up to 11.5 hours of talk time, up to 18 days of standby time, up to 35 hours of music playback time, or up to 4 hours of video playback time.

You are lucky if you are living in the States, because HTC has finally rolled out the HTC Touch HD2 via T-Mobile USA with an internal memory boost. The T-Mobile version has a 1GB ROM and a 576MB RAM, which means that you can install more applications or store more data on it. What’s more, the HTC Touch HD2 is also sold with a 16GB microSD card. The phone should be running with Windows Mobile 6.5 OS.

Here’s a rendered image of HTC’s upcoming Android smartphone ‘Supersonic’. The handset is said to feature a 4.3-inch OLED display, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a 5-megapixel camera, a 1GB ROM, WiMAX connectivity, a kickstand on the back and run on Android 2.1 with Sense UI. The phone itself will be coming to Sprint sometime in March.

Motorola has started selling the MOTOCUBO A45 Eco via its North American direct-to-consumer store. Priced at $160, the phone sports a full QWERTY slider with a 2-megapixel camera, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a microSD (up to 32GB), and a QVGA display. This environmental friendly handset is made from recycled and corn-based materials.

While putting Google’s Nexus One through its paces Reuters have discovered that the speech to text facility within the Nexus One will remove any profanities. If you try to transcribe and foul language the offending word is replaced by hashes e.g. that’s a load of bullshit, becomes: that’s a load off bull####.
When questioned as to why Google has chosen to take this stance on profanity, Google had the following to say:

“We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent,” said Google.

HotHardware are reporting that AT&T are to loose exclusivity of the Apple [AAPL] iPhone this Wednesday. No reports of other networks have been mentioned yet who are going to be taking the iPhone on-board, but this Wednesday also happens to coincide with a potential major Apple announcement which is believed to be the iSlate unveiling as well as iPhone OS 4.0 and now, perhaps the iPhone going on to other networks in the US.

Hothardware go on to mention that this could be a good thing for AT&T as the iPhone seems to be hurting their network. By giving options to customers on various networks will hopefully share the usage around and potentially lower the data used on each of the networks.

When launched on a CDMA network this could significantly increase sales. Hopefully other networks are prepared for the extra data usage (of course if all this actually ends up happening as it is just rumour right now).

Another point to mention is that AT&T could be introducing a number of smartphones on to their network that will include Windows Phone, Android and WebOS devices. We should hear more of this over the coming weeks although it will be interesting to see what happens Wednesday when the iSlate could be unveiled.