What they build on top of the Linux kernel, however, is entirely up to them. Motorola is in the delicate position of guessing how we'll all work in a few years' time and, for the first time since the 1980s, new and disruptive technologies mean almost anything is possible.

Motorola could build an operating system that lives in the cloud, for example--something like a cell phone version of Google Chrome OS. iOS and Android are arguably too mature to be retooled for true cloud integration, even though they were created from the ground-up to always be online.

A cloud OS could feature applications that are accessed online, with an expectation that user data will live there too. This could significantly reduce the costs of the phone (those 8, 16 and 32GB chunks of flash memory are one of the biggest), although the cost arguably would be transferred elsewhere for the user, who would pay higher cellular data charges. Whatever the case, the is still an issue, so this would be a difficult case to make to consumers.

Motorola could try and create a social networking-enabled OS but that's old hat nowadays, and a handful of phone vendors have been bitten by similar attempts. The of that particular treacherous harbor. A social-based OS could also limit the potential market because people tend to associate the term "social networking" with teenagers.

And what if a new technology comes along that turns Facebook and Twitter into ?