MobileUX

Motorola just recently announced their first two Android-based devices, which is great news for the open source OS that has been gaining momentum over the past year. But Motorola has added a new twist, called Motoblur, that interconnects and automatically updates many of the “social” apps on the device. It has taken a play from Palm’s WebOS’s Synergy and extended it. In a nutshell, Motoblur is a customizable top UI layer that is viewed on the device homescreen that displays updates from various feeds from Twitter, Facebook, local weather, news, etc. Think auto-update widgets that you can pull to the surface and simply turn on so that whenever you take a quick view of your device you always see the latest updates from (your) selected friends, sites, etc. Very cool.

This is a great step in the right direction. When I think of mobile, I think of this kind of interconnectedness between apps. What Motoblur effectively does is move the device beyond application silos and instead focus on functionality. The key here is that the device provides a richer experience by pushing information to the user rather than making the user go find the information.  For example, for me to find out about updates to a friend’s Facebook status, on the iPhone I have to open the Facebook app.  When I’m done, I close the app (so I can use other apps), which effectively turns off any updates from my friends.  With Motoblur, I simply pull the Facebook functionality to the homescreen and I can automatically see updates.  The nice thing is that you can do this for many of the apps, for websites, etc.

Probably the best way to get a sense of the interface is by watching the hands-on video taken by the Phonedog folks embedded below.

Again, this is the type of innovation – one that I feel Palm kicked off earlier this year – that makes mobile devices more and more useful. The “interconnectedness” of the Motoblur layer also extends to contacts, email, and calendar – think unified address book between Facebook, Outlook, and Google, or a single “messaging” inbox that pulls in discussions from email, SMS, etc. Again, this is very much what Palm’s Synergy functionality provides – it’s just nice to see it hitting another OS, especially one that has been on the market for almost a year and is becoming more mature through the release of additional devices. At a more abstract level, Motoblur is pushing the Android OS to be based on a “collect-and-query paradigm” – information is pulled from multiple sources to create a searchable/filterable group – as opposed to a “structure-and-browse” approach (such as the iPhone) where you actively create and curate the repository (e.g. address book contacts.) Ars Technica’s WebOS review provides a deeper discussion of these two approaches – this discussion highlights to me the forward-thinkingness of Motoblur and WebOS and the importance of this approach to help evolve the mobile experience.