Motorola will continue to include its MotoBlur user interface on Android-running handsets, but will stop putting resources into the promotion of the UI as a brand, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said during a conference call announcing the company’s fiscal second-quarter earnings.
“We have found that being able to convey the value proposition around MotoBlur is not an easy thing to do in a 30-second ad spot,” Jha said during the July 29 call. “We have decided that we will focus on the value proposition of products and not MotoBlur as a brand name in its own right.”
Jha’s comment comes as Google prepares to launch Android 3.0, code-named Gingerbread-one recent report predicted the Android 3.0 launch would be in mid-October-which is expected to make interfaces such as MotoBlur redundant.
HTC similarly makes a UI, Sense, built to run on top of Android and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 devices. Like Android 3.0, the Windows Phone 7 OS is expected to exert greater control over the device than earlier versions of the operating system. Regardless, HTC still plans to include Sense on HTC handsets running Windows Phone 7, Drew Bamford, head of HTC’s user experience design team, told Forbes in a July report.
“We won’t be able to replace as much of the core Windows Phone experience, but we will augment it,” Bamford said, according to Forbes.
On Aug. 10, Motorola introduced the Droid 2 smartphone, and true to Jha’s word, there was no mention of MotoBlur. However, press materials did boast that the smartphone lets users “stay up-to-date with friends using the preloaded social networking widgets that allow you to sync and stream your feeds and updates from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to one screen in real time”-language that previously might have described MotoBlur.
“MotoBlur continues to be important and I think you will see increased functionality in MotoBlur,” Jha said during the earnings call. “But as a brand name … I don’t think that’s going to be our focus going forward, but we see the experience that we deliver as being relevant and differentiating us.”