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Root Gingerbread Blur Review

Kevmueller

Kevmueller

Android Expert
So I have been playing with the leaked Gingerbread for the past two plus days. The next build of Android is great, but what is even more impressive is what Motorola has done with Blur. To many of you Blur has become an evil 4 letter word that ranks right up there with Locked Bootloader. This has changed and had they changed the name to something else other than Blur I think people would be raving about the change. However I have to give Motorola some props for the changes they made, it was like they actually asked customers what they wanted and listened and did it. It is not perfect, but man it is enough for me to stick with the stock launcher and blur for awhile. If any one has anything I am missing feel free to add it.

Theme
 
I couldn't agree more with everything. However I did switch launchers because I cannot full up 7 home screens and its kind of a pet peeve of mine to have empty screens. Maybe I'll figure something out.
 
Dumb question. Does your Blur homescreen rotate? Mine does not. If I use LauncherPro, it does; fancy animation and all.
 
No it does not. Which does not bother me since the last launcher I was using was ADW Ex and I had it disabled to rotate.
 
Very nice review.

I like in the app drawer you can setup categories. Thats one thing I liked about ADW Ex. This Blur launcher does it better to me. U can assign icons to categories too..

I dont know if this is Gingerbread or Blur but the cursor control is changed. Its underneath the letters when typing now. Even tho the red bullseye was ok, this way is better.
 
PACAnesFan said:
Dumb question. Does your Blur homescreen rotate? Mine does not. If I use LauncherPro, it does; fancy animation and all.
Click to expand...

I can confirm this. No rotation at all on any of the home screens, but all of the apps and everything else rotates just fine. I have yet to fire up LPP as I want to run Blur as I am actually liking it a lot.

Nice review, you hit a ton of the hot spots I was going to post. I really like the new Social widget and I am loving the contacts. Much easier and more intuitive.
 
I'm loving pretty much everything about GB except this intermittent keyboard lag. I never experienced any lag at all before, but sometimes they keyboard will hang up a bit, during texts or entering URL's. I've done two factory resets to see if it would help. So far it's doing well right now...hopefully it stays that way.
 
jroc said:
Very nice review.

I like in the app drawer you can setup categories. Thats one thing I liked about ADW Ex. This Blur launcher does it better to me. U can assign icons to categories too..

I dont know if this is Gingerbread or Blur but the cursor control is changed. Its underneath the letters when typing now. Even tho the red bullseye was ok, this way is better.
Click to expand...

Great point and my bad for totally missing the app drawer review. It is a huge improvement as well. Has anyone else noticed on the downloaded apps you can now uninstall apps from just holding on them, it will pull up a menu that will allow you to uninstall. Amazing enhancement.
 
^Yea, thats nice. Makes it easier to manage apps. Playing around with it some more, you can set it up to list apps in abc order, frequently used or recently used.

Isnt frequently used and recently used kinda redundant tho? lol I also dont know if this was in the stock launcher on Froyo. I used it all of one day and got rid of it.

This launcher? I havent installed ADW or any other launcher yet...had Gingerbread on my phone since last night.
 
As much as I would love to make the switch, SBF'ing in the past has been problematic with my computer, so I think I'll just wait till the OTA is released and rooted :)
 
Just seen something with the FM Radio. Its has a Cover Flow like look. It also just has a different look overall thats nice. Its a lil easier to exit the radio, add and edit the radio station list too.

I dont know if the launcher and FM Radio has been floating around as .apk's. But every time I turn around I'm finding something else I like with GB on the X.
 
Does anyone know if the lock screen is fixed with Gingerbread? You couldn't disable it when Froyo was issued unless you used an app.
 
I'm not sure if it's my phone that's being weird, but when I try and switch profiles, it erases everything that I had on the profile I was previously on. So I have to arrange all my apps again. Has anybody else noticed this? I understand that it's not perfect because they haven't officially released it, but it's still frustrating.
 
jroc said:
I like in the app drawer you can setup categories.
Click to expand...

This is also a killer feature for me, made even better by the fact that you can add these app groups as a "smart folder" shortcut on your home screens. This makes managing a large app drawer easy and the fact that the smart folders update on the home screen when you change them in the drawer is great. This is the reason that I used to use "Tag Home" as my default launcher.

The few things that could still be improved though is that you can't add an app group to the 3 customizable launcher shortcuts. Tag Home also provides a better mechanism for tagging multiple apps at once, seeing what multiple tags you have applied to a given app and seeing a list of untagged apps (although recently downloaded sort of serves that purpose)

But this is still a nice new feature.

Dave
 
Blur is a lot better than the last version, but is still way behind when compared to Sense and perhaps even Samsung's UI.

Surprising considering Moto has been in the game much longer, and had a head start on HTC.
 
novemberwhiskey said:
Blur is a lot better than the last version, but is still way behind when compared to Sense and perhaps even Samsung's UI.

Surprising considering Moto has been in the game much longer, and had a head start on HTC.
Click to expand...
I actually like the new Blur better than Sense.

I still prefer a custom launcher though. But the general Blur UI with LPP is awesome.
 
Good review. I believe you missed the fact that you can categorize your apps into folders and put shortcuts on the homescreen, changing the icons. This is one of the biggest benefits for me. You can see them in the screenshot below.

snap20110416_234455.png
 
I concur with everything said. I'm shocked. I hated Froyo blur but GB blur is pretty damn good. No lags and hangs...UI is sophisticated beyond the ugly froyo blur. If u know how to root give the new leak a try.
 
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