A Closer Look at MOTOBLUR

‘Your entire life, in a single stream’, at least that’s how Motorola describe MOTOBLUR in their teaser video.  But just what is it, and does it do anything different to the various other UI’s skinning mobile operating systems?  While we wait for the release of the Motorola DEXT, here’s a more in-depth look at MOTOBLUR.

Motorola has designed a series of new widgets for the Android home screen, each with a focus on drawing information from your phone and online into one location, and collectively they’re known as MOTOBLUR.  Together with push style data feeds, everything is continually updated.  For example, the Happenings widget deals with Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, pulling in all your friends details and refreshing when something new is posted.  To make things even easier, you’ll only ever need to log into all these sites once – when you first set up the phone.

Happenings integrates with your contacts, in a similar way to the INQ1, where each person’s file contains their details plus any status updates, their picture and mood.  This then goes even deeper, with the ability to go back over old updates or view a complete list of all recent activity.  When a friend calls, all their personal updates even show up there!

All this would be pretty pointless if you still had to visit the individual sites to update your own profile, thus MOTOBLUR has the Messages widget, where you can type your updates, press Post and your latest message is sent to your choice of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, or all at the same time!  This also works for sharing pictures over the same services, plus Picasa and Photobucket too.

Finally, just like Apple’s Find My iPhone service, MOTOBLUR uses the phone’s GPS to help you locate your lost phone, plus provides a remote wipe option if it gets stolen.  A handy bonus is a back-up of all your data will be ready to be transferred straight on to your new device.

So, it’s a little like HTC’s Sense, a little like Palm’s Synergy on the Pre and a little like the INQ1, which always punched way above its weight.  It’s also a little like a thousand applications which do the very same things and, of course, online options such as Friendfeed.  However, by integrating them so tightly inside an attractive device, plus really thinking about making the social networking fans lives easier, Motorola appear to have created a very impressive alternative to using all these different services individually – and if there is one thing we all love, it’s being saved time and effort.

The DEXT is due before the end of the year in the UK, and after getting to know MOTOBLUR a little better, our already heightened anticipation has grown even more!