Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman front pocket now calm and this is a look at moto blur on the AT&T motorola backflip this is 18 T's first Android device motoblur is Motorola's proprietary interface that sits on top of Android 1.5 they can also put it on other versions of Android kind of like how HTC s HTC sense that sits on top of Android to kind of change the experience to allow them to differentiate their product from the other OEMs out there so we're to talk about what this motoblur interface brings why it's different and also talk about the homescreen configurations on the motorola backflip so we're to start off by turning on the device and unlocking it and i'm going to zoom in on the screen a little bit so you get a better view okay so the first thing that you'll notice right out of the box on the motorola backflip is that it will ask you to sign up with certain social networks and it can you can hook up to a lot of social networks i'll show you the full list in a second i hooked it up with Twitter and Facebook so I'm seeing information from Twitter and Facebook and also my exchange account my email account over here so right off the bat what we have here at the top is a widget that lets us quickly update our status on multiple social networks which i think is quite nice very easy access so I can type a message here could flip open the keyboard or I get the nice Android on-screen keyboard you can also choose whether I want to broadcast it to Twitter Facebook were all services so really in one shot I can update my status across multiple social networks which is quite nice there's some other widgets that you get here this one is called the happenings widget and the purpose behind this is that it will show you a recent quote happening from one of the social networks are signed up with so right now I'm seeing a little a little F for facebook so this person has updated their status on facebook they are using profanity in their tweet or in their facebook status that will have to ignore that but you get the idea it will tie into many social networks and bring you the latest that is happening over here on the Left we have a stream right into my email so i can see my recent most email and i can tap on that to bring that up swiping to the left and to the right we have five different panels that we can customize just like a typical android device and let's go through the widgets that you get included on the motorola backflip as as you get it out of the box there are already a lot of widgets kind of cluttering up the home screen but let's take a look at sort of our other choices so here we have the basic android stuff like analog clock music calendar picture frame and search but any any place you see a little speech bubble that is one of the motoblur widgets so we already talked about happenings we already talked about messages we're going to show you news in a second and there are some other motoblur things here social status that's what I showed you that you can update your status on multiple social networks and also whether it's an accuweather widget i'm going to show you that in a second as well let's see what else we can do from here if we tap and hold we can also add shortcuts as you can do on any android device to a URL or to a contact or program can also do change the folders or of course change the wallpaper to something that you enjoy so let's look at these other widgets here's one of the news widgets from motoblur and the ideas that you can swipe to the right and swipe to the left to see the news stories a very nice way to sort of flip through news i think and from here you can tap on a headline it will open up the web browser and show you the full story we'll talk about the web browser in the next video okay let's go back here is a widget for your music not really unique to the backflip here and you can see this stuff has changed over here on the right since I've done this video it says it was updated two minutes ago and this time we have changed again before it was from Twitter and outs from facebook so it's constantly updating here to the right we have a yahoo search widget we have another news widget which is kind of general news and we can swipe to the right again nice little smooth interface we have an analog clock we have a weather widget but this is just the standard accuweather widget we can swipe or actually tap down here to change between detailed forecast and the extended forecast so it's nice to have that and over to the right we have tips and tricks and getting started kind of stuff to help you get going with your backflip so if we tap tips and tricks again we get this little pop-up bubble interface that reminds you of the motoblur logo get little tips on conserving battery life and that sort of thing I don't know why keeps going back to that screen and over here we can just look through some getting started articles so let's talk about some other aspects of the motoblur interface if we swipe to the right we have a thing here called account settings and this is what you get to set up all the social networks for motoblur and take a look at all the networks it supports it's quite amazing so we got Facebook and Google and YouTube and different email accounts in picasa and skyrock and you get a little check mark to show which of these services are currently being pulled from and they are all saved under a motoblur account so presumably if you work too hard reset your device you could get all of this information back without having to reset up all these social networks which is quite a nice feature let's go to the application tray I'm going to show you a few things here's happenings and this is kind of a more extended view of what you saw before so in here I get a stream of all of my social networks some people may like this some people may not I personally like to keep my facebook and twitter stuff set separate but you can actually just scroll down and see little icons the tea or the or the F depending on where these the update is coming from and let's say that you find something that you like you can tap on it you will get the entire tweet or the entire facebook status update you can actually reply to that person really quickly so this is kind of heavy the Twitter integration works very simple but it works quite nicely so that was happenings let me show you the context menu because it actually integrates with all different sorts of areas so I'm not sure that I like this too much the contacts menu is pulling from my my normal contacts from my email account it's pulling from facebook and it's pulling from Twitter it's a little bit awkward because most of the people that I correspond with on Twitter I don't really know personally so I don't necessarily need to see them included in my contacts on my phone and furthermore they don't have any sort of phone number associated with their Twitter information I'm not really sure why motorola decided to do this it's just way too much I mean it's an endless list of context from all of my social networks you can do some things to sort of filter this out of course you can search for a particular contact so that you can find the one that you want so you don't have to be a sea of contacts all the time there's also some interesting buttons down here at the bottom so if we go to history we are taken to a list of the history of all of my communication on any social network in any SMS and any email it's kind of creepy actually that it's doing this and it really doesn't serve any purpose in my mind but if I were to scroll to the top you would see that I recently sent a text message to this person this person I recently had a call with this person I just got an email from this person and so on and so forth so it may be handy if you don't correspond with that many people but for me it's just a massive massive list of stuff that I really can't get much value from and finally there's a button over here that says status and quite simply this will tie again into your contacts and try to pull the person's latest status whether it's from facebook or twitter or any other social network and it will just display a little status right underneath and you can tap on the person's name to bring it up whoops went a little fast there and just like the previous screen we can see we can add reply to the person we can also drill down more precisely to see this person's list of tweets and that sort of thing so overall I think motoblur is an interesting concept that of bringing it together many different kinds of social networks into one place but at the same time it just it's a little bit chaotic and not very productive for me I really want to have a great email experience I don't care care so much about knowing what everyone's doing at every second through every different social network that I subscribe to but I think for a lot of younger people that are really into social networking that are very much into communicating with their 1,000 friends the motoblur interface may be a winner but for me I think it's a little bit too much so that was a look at the motoblur interface coming up soon we're going to talk about the web browsing on the motorola backflip and talk about the built-in programs and the overall experience including battery life and performance and call quality so that's it for now