Droid X

The Droid X is Motorola's first retail device to use the company's custom UI atop Android 2.1, a skin that has been significantly restyled from the version found on Android 1.5 devices like the CLIQ, Devour, and CLIQ XT. But let's be clear: the Droid X doesn't use Blur. Actually, we'd initially been given conflicting answers from Motorola on whether the Droid X actually "runs" Blur, and we think we know why: as far as we can tell, the phone sidesteps Motorola's proprietary back end entirely, which has been a source of many of Blur's problems from day one -- delayed updates and the like. Instead, Moto appears to now be taking the same angle that most of its competitors are, pushing all of the aggregation horsepower down to the phone and taking its own servers out of the equation. In practice, what this means is that you no longer have a Blur account -- you just log in to your individual services (Twitter, Facebook, and the like) and the phone keeps track.

At a quick glance, the new skin -- Blur 2.1, or whatever you want to call it -- is cleaner, prettier, and just generally more modern than the skin it replaces, but that doesn't mean it's good. In fact, it feels as though Motorola heard and just completely misinterpreted the complaints about Blur to begin with, spending its energy making it less obvious that Blur is running without actually addressing any of its fundamental problems. Here's a great example: when you add a Twitter account, all of your Twitter follows automatically puke into your contacts list, which we'd complained about way back when we reviewed the CLIQ last year. Yes, you can sort, but what Motorola really needed to do here was make it optional the same way that Twitter's official Android app does.