For its next Android phone, Motorola will reacquaint with its social network-centric Blur interface.
The Motorola Devour drops the macho look of the phone maker's previous effort, the Droid, in favor of a silver slider phone with turquoise accents. It also abandons the Droid's straight-up version of Android in favor of Blur, a customer interface that debuted with last year's Cliq Android phone. Blur constantly pushes updates from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter onto the main page, and melts e-mails and text messages into a single home page widget.
The Devour will also be the first Android phone for Verizon Wireless that doesn't use Droid branding. However, by the time the Desire arrives in March (price unknown), Google's Nexus One shouldn't be far behind, as it's due to land on Verizon in the spring.
Other specs for the Devour include a 3.1-inch capacitive touch screen, a touch-sensitive navigation pad (presumably for positioning a text cursor), a pre-installed 8 GB memory card, Bluetooth and integrated GPS. The phone also automatically backs up contacts, social network messages and customizations to a secure server for recovery. If the phone is lost, you can use GPS to track it, or wipe its data remotely.
Strangely, Motorola's press release doesn't mention a camera. I'd be surprised and somewhat turned off if it didn't have one, especially since this phone is geared towards socializing. If I was constantly sending out Facebook and Twitter updates, I'd want to include photos once in a while.
The Devour is one of roughly 20 Android phones Motorola plans to release in 2010, including one sold directly by Google. I'm curious to see how all these phones differentiate themselves, and bringing back the Blur interface is a start. The Cliq got good reviews, but not great ones, mostly because of a weak processor, poor battery performance and some minor user interface gripes, such as the lack of a file manager. Hopefully Motorola can fix those mistakes with the Devour.
