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Will MotoBlur be easily removed from the Olympus?

Q

qcom

Well-Known Member
I have AT&T, and I was originally thinking about the Nexus S, until I realized I couldn't take advantage of AT&T's blazing fast 3G data speeds! :p

So, I think the Olympus will be my next phone. A little sad, considering I will have to deal with non-vanilla Android. Although, hopefully it will be 2.3 and not Motoblur with 2.2!

I was wondering how possible anyone thinks it will be to remove Motoblur from the Olympus and install 2.3.

How safe is this to do?

What are the risks?

I really want stock 2.3, but I can't really get that on AT&T at the moment. And plus, a Dual-Core is always nice!
 
Moto is a leader in being a pain in the ass for rooting, but it will probablytake between one week and three weeks for the gods over at XDA to uncripple this beast of a cell phone. As for motoblur, I'm with you, I just want stock so I will definitely be flashing a vanilla gingerbread ROM as soon as it's available. I have a samsung phone, and it comes with a skin called touchwiz (it's terrible, I think even worse than motoblur), so I rooted it, backed everything up, and then followed the step by step instructions to flash a better ROM.

Is it safe? Well, yes and no... It's definitely possible to break your phone, but if you make makeups, it seems like 99.9% of the time it can be undone. Secondly, if you read up on XDA, follow the thread, and make sure you're following the instructions to a T, you will be good :)
 
Blur is a pain but I would say that it's 'manageable'.

I have used LauncherPro in place of it and given Google own my existence I use a Google account _outside_ of Blur for my mail/contacts etc.

I can handle Blur sticking its nose into Facebook etc.
 
Komodo Rogue said:
Moto is a leader in being a pain in the ass for rooting, but it will probablytake between one week and three weeks for the gods over at XDA to uncripple this beast of a cell phone. As for motoblur, I'm with you, I just want stock so I will definitely be flashing a vanilla gingerbread ROM as soon as it's available. I have a samsung phone, and it comes with a skin called touchwiz (it's terrible, I think even worse than motoblur), so I rooted it, backed everything up, and then followed the step by step instructions to flash a better ROM.

Is it safe? Well, yes and no... It's definitely possible to break your phone, but if you make makeups, it seems like 99.9% of the time it can be undone. Secondly, if you read up on XDA, follow the thread, and make sure you're following the instructions to a T, you will be good :)
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Thanks for the post! Sounds like a plan. Which Samsung phone do you have? Is it part of the Galaxy series? I thought Touchwiz looked decent, for a skin, but, the most annoying parts of skins usually lie in their lag, so if it has lag that's just garbage.

karnka said:
Blur is a pain but I would say that it's 'manageable'.

I have used LauncherPro in place of it and given Google own my existence I use a Google account _outside_ of Blur for my mail/contacts etc.

I can handle Blur sticking its nose into Facebook etc.
Click to expand...

I think I would rather completely remove Blur from the device instead of just using a different launcher. I would suspect, although this may be completely wrong, that the handset will perform a lot better once it's completely ridden of the crapware vs just hiding it, so to speak.
 
I agree it would be better to remove it but bear in mind it's quite deeply integrated into the account management so you would need an entire ROM, not just a bit of rooting/removing.

On the performance front, having the blur launcher hiding behind the scenes hasn't caused any notable issues.
 
qcom said:
Thanks for the post! Sounds like a plan. Which Samsung phone do you have? Is it part of the Galaxy series? I thought Touchwiz looked decent, for a skin, but, the most annoying parts of skins usually lie in their lag, so if it has lag that's just garbage.



I think I would rather completely remove Blur from the device instead of just using a different launcher. I would suspect, although this may be completely wrong, that the handset will perform a lot better once it's completely ridden of the crapware vs just hiding it, so to speak.
Click to expand...

I have the Captivate, AT&T's galaxy s. You're right about the lag - TERRIBLE! But after I got Froyo running, removed all bloatware, and some nice system tweaks to boot, it was smooth as butter :)

You could definitely just skin over motoblur like karnka suggested with LauncherPro (btw I bought launcherpro Plus, it's like 3 bucks I think, very worth it if you use calendar / facebook widgets), and considering the rumored power of olympus, you would probably not notice the extra garbage, but yeah if you have the patience for it, I would suggest reading the rooting an flashing instructions over at XDA once they are available. Either way, you'll be happy! Can't wait for this phone, I really think this will be the phone to beat in the first half of 2011!
 
I had a Galaxy S and the lag was nothing to do with TouchWiz. It was the way that Samsungs choice of filesystem interacted with the flash controller. The Galaxy S was one bad engineering decision after another by Samsung and I'd never have one of their phones again.

One last comment on the likes of Blur/TouchWiz/Sense, it's never going to be the launcher remaining in the background that's going to cause you any performance issues. If you have such problems it'll end up being other behind the scenes services.
 
karnka said:
I had a Galaxy S and the lag was nothing to do with TouchWiz. It was the way that Samsungs choice of filesystem interacted with the flash controller. The Galaxy S was one bad engineering decision after another by Samsung and I'd never have one of their phones again.

One last comment on the likes of Blur/TouchWiz/Sense, it's never going to be the launcher remaining in the background that's going to cause you any performance issues. If you have such problems it'll end up being other behind the scenes services.
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True - it was the Voodoo lagfix that removed the lag. Voodoo was included with the ROM I flashed.

I wouldn't go so far to say that the launcher NEVER creates performance issues; look at the custom launcher that initially shipped with the dell streak.

One question, karnka: I always feels compelled to flash a new rom and remove the custom skin, because I use LauncherPro anyway, so I don't want to have two custom launchers running simultaneously (like motoblur & LP or touchwiz & LP). However, is this flawed logic? Once you set LP as the default launcher, does the original (motoblur,touchwiz,sense, whatever) still run in the background, taking up some RAM, or does it stop running altogether when you set LP as the default and launch it?
 
Ok, maybe never is a bit of a strong word.

I would point out that when you have TouchWiz/Blur on the phone you don't have the stock launcher on there too, so in reality putting LauncherPro over the top is no different than on a stock handset.

Anyway, to your question; I wouldn't be 100% sure I'm right but my understanding was that the launcher applications are nothing special and are cleaned up in the same way as any other application. I wouldn't be surprised if the Blur/TouchWiz launchers are automatically started on boot but I have always assumed they would be cleaned up / closed as the resources were needed.
 
Komodo Rogue said:
Moto is a leader in being a pain in the ass for rooting, but it will probablytake between one week and three weeks for the gods over at XDA to uncripple this beast of a cell phone. As for motoblur, I'm with you, I just want stock so I will definitely be flashing a vanilla gingerbread ROM as soon as it's available. I have a samsung phone, and it comes with a skin called touchwiz (it's terrible, I think even worse than motoblur), so I rooted it, backed everything up, and then followed the step by step instructions to flash a better ROM.

Is it safe? Well, yes and no... It's definitely possible to break your phone, but if you make makeups, it seems like 99.9% of the time it can be undone. Secondly, if you read up on XDA, follow the thread, and make sure you're following the instructions to a T, you will be good :)
Click to expand...

Hopefully they dont lock down the bootloader like they have been doing with the motorola devices that have come out lately. If thats the case it will take much longer to get custom roms onto the phone if they ever get them on the phone
 
ckochinsky125 said:
Hopefully they dont lock down the bootloader like they have been doing with the motorola devices that have come out lately. If thats the case it will take much longer to get custom roms onto the phone if they ever get them on the phone
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, I would guess that it will have a locked bootloader - why stop now? I don't know all of moto's high end phones, but ever since the droid X, all of the high-end moto devices had a locked bootloader, right?

The good news is that this won't stop ANYTHING. It will, at best, slow things down, but in time it will be cracked open, just like everything before it! :) Especially considering the rumored specs of this phone, and how it's going to be moto's flagship for multiple carriers for the first half of 2011, I would guess it will be quite popular at XDA. Has there ever been a popular android phone that nobody ever managed to permanently root and flash?

Really, I don't even know why manufacturers bother trying.
 
Can someone help me understand what is so bad about blur? My girlfriend has it on her phone and I have always thought it looked pretty cool the way it integrates her fb and msgs on her phone. But, then again, I have never used it directly. I have just watched it on hers so I would like to hear the opinion of others with explanation why as well. Thanks!
 
ednygma said:
Can someone help me understand what is so bad about blur? My girlfriend has it on her phone and I have always thought it looked pretty cool the way it integrates her fb and msgs on her phone. But, then again, I have never used it directly. I have just watched it on hers so I would like to hear the opinion of others with explanation why as well. Thanks!
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Just a matter of what you prefer.

And another quedtion. Will the 2.3 be stock android or blur?
 
ladnum said:
Just a matter of what you prefer.

And another quedtion. Will the 2.3 be stock android or blur?
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Actually, it's going to run 2.2 (froyo) :(

I'm sure they skinned the hell out of it with blur. Especially considering it has the software integration with the laptop, and can be used in like "laptop mode."

This phone is amazing... I sure hope the XDA crew crack this baby open, and get some stock gingerbread running! :D
 
The 'nettop mode' thing is just an application it self. It'll work in much the same way as the media and car dock modes work on the current droid2/milestone2.
 
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