Motoblur enhances social networking by pushing content in real time to the user — such as through Facebook, Twitter or RSS feeds — and aggregating it in card-like windows, without the need for opening a separate application.
Moreover, Motoblur backs up your data to a Motorola-hosted cloud, allows you to track a lost phone using GPS and even allows you to remotely wipe the device.
THE ADVANTAGES
Smartphones are perhaps the most intimate of electronic devices and a boon to marketers everywhere. They record our conversations, trace our movement, mimic our reading habits, discern our music tastes and monitor our usage habits throughout the day. They know what things we like to read, who we like to talk to, what we like to listen to, what games we like to play and where we spend our waking hours.
Such data harvesting has never been possible up until just a few years ago, and the expansion of social media means people are increasingly open to offering such information without thinking twice about it.
While the current Motoblur is social networking-focused, don’t let that fool you. While you’re aggregating data from elsewhere, Motorola is aggregating data from you. In effect, Motoblur is the key to Motorola’s customers, and serves as the platform through which the company can tailor its offerings.
The Motoblur services suite transforms Motorola from a purely hardware player to a double threat. By implementing it, Motorola is tapping into the habits of its massive user base to learn from them and adapt to meet user needs.
In one way, Motoblur is a social networking facilitator. In another, it’s a cloud-based security blanket.
But Motorola has said that Motoblur will evolve over time, and is not necessarily just social networking. Perhaps that’s why the company had such immense difficulty explaining exactly what Motoblur was to members of the press and customers — so much, in fact, that Co-CEO Sanjay Jha had to clarify what it was in the wake of the announcement of Android 2.0. (And, to be frank, most folks still don’t get it.)
But that’s because Motoblur is an empty shell for Motorola to fill with services. It’s not just social networking or security because it can do more than that, if the company wills it to. And it will.
Regardless of the details, Motorola already claims hundreds of thousands of Motoblur activations already. That’s important because it demonstrates that Motoblur is, at scale, sending billions of bytes worth of data feedback straight to the company.
To be sure, Motoblur allows Motorola to visually and experientially differentiate itself from other Android competitors such as HTC and Samsung.
But it also allows Motorola to gain valuable insight that could help it keep those consumers hooked.
THE CHALLENGES
Motorola’s initial Android handsets have certainly helped it rekindle its brand recognition among mobile users.
But the challenge facing the company is to ensure that the Motoblur branch doesn’t veer too far from the tree — that is, the main trunk of Google Android development.
While Motoblur serves as a tool that allows Motorola to better adapt to its users, it also serves as a hindrance when its users are suddenly left behind the rest of the Android ecosystem.
Like rival HTC with its Sense UI, Motorola’s Motoblur depends on in-house software development on top of existing Google Android development. Last year was indicative of the troubles this could potentially cause: in exactly one year’s time, Google Android catapulted through several versions from version 1.0 to 2.1.
While plain Google Android installations on the T-Mobile (HTC) G1 and T-Mobile myTouch 3G allowed those handsets to upgrade as soon as Google released the new version of its operating system, handsets like the Cliq (1.5) and HTC’s Hero (1.5) were left behind, missing new must-have features until Motorola developers processed the new release.
