MotoBlur and Anroid: Refreshed UI, Better Usability and still few tweaks needed

Motorola Atrix 2 comes with Android Gingerbread v2.3.6 which is now obviously dated. As with any Android OEM even Motorola has skinned the stock Android UI with their home grown MotoBlur UI. The latest MotoBlur UI is far, far better than previous iterations. Besides, it runs very smoothly. Previous MotoBlur UI has been the target of critics for its dodgy and sluggish performance. MotoBlur completely overhauls the stock Android UI/UX and gives refreshing experience every time you look at it. Plus the bright theme of the MotoBlur UI benefits from the excellent display of the Atrix 2 and complements the device in-return. Making it attractive even on the software side.

By default, there are just five homescreens available with MotoBlur UI and you can’t add more or delete any of them. You can’t even change their ordering. There are many useful widgets available to put on the homescreen but in our opinion many of them were oversized and occupied more space than necessary on the homescreen. Since you can’t add more homscreens it puts restrictions on number of widgets you can use, not that you’ll need all widgets at the same time but it’s always good to have some freedom. Plus these oversized widgets make your homescreen look cramped up.  There are cool effects when you scroll through homescreens.

Just like the stock Android, even the one on Atrix 2 uses single wallapaper and stretches them across all homescreens.  The main menu shows apps in 4×4 grid. You have limited choice of sorting your apps. You can’t arrange them as you wish.

The Phone app as usual holds contacts, dialer and log application together. The dialer has specious keys and smart dial is present too. Contacts app can synchronise your contacts from Gmail Account, Facebook and Twitter.

Messaging and Email:

The Atrix 2 features standard Android messaging which is already appreciated by users  and crtitcs as well. Motorola has also replaced the stock Android keyboard which takes full benefit of screen estate of Atrix 2. Typing with this keyboard was a very good experience, there was no place for mishits. Keys were big enough and comfortable. It also suggests words as you start typing and can also correct if there are any mistakes. If you’re lazy to type everything, you can also dictate and it’ll listen, detect and type for you. Mind you it worked properly even in noisy environment. We must give credits to Motorola for this excellent job. The message box accomodates six lines of text. Just above the send button, there’s a character counter.

Next comes the Email. As usual there are two mail clients available, one dedicated for GMail accounts and another client to handle everything else. While this Email client is supposed to support all major service providers we faced issues with configuring our email accounts. First we faced issues while configuring any of our email accounts. We formatted our unit and it started working. While we could configure Hotmail account properly we had problem with configuring Yahoo.co.in account.  You can also sync your corporate accounts if there’s Exchange ActiveSync support. With Exchange ActiveSync you can sync your contacts and calendars in addition to regular emails.  We tried it with Hotmail (since Hotmail now supports Exchange ActiveSync) and it the Atrix 2 detected all the necessary settings which we would need to input manually on other handsets. Intelligent we say.  If Motorola fixes the small issues which we faced then it’s a perfect email client.

The email client also has some basic text editing functions.