Art Baudo, a senior product marketing manager at Motorola Corp. who helped in the at CES, said his training as an engineer had helped in developing new ideas for smartphones.

"It's a creative process and a coalescing of ideas," Baudo said. Motorola, which has a bigger booth at CES this year than last year, has been reinvigorated with its launch of new Android phones, including the Droid.

"You have to have direction in a creative process and the Android platform strategy at Motorola helps direct the design group," Baudo said.

Baudo said his team recognizes the need to be cutting edge in mobile phone designs, but also practical. "We share ideas around the water cooler, but also have to solve things for phones to [accomplish]. For example, we know that today's social networking is super, but will be tomorrow's dud, for sure."

Today's innovations will evolve, he said. For example, the Backflip has a unique touchscreen that also has a separate touchscreen on the back, called Backtouch, that can be used to help a person flip through photos or icons while also showing the photos to another person. But Baudo said the Backtouch concept isn't fully realized, which is something that open source developers in Android will probably explore.