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The Motorola Charm has all the standard Android messaging options, plus the extras that come with Motorola's BLUR interface. Google services are segregated, so Gmail gets its own app and Google Talk gets its own client, but these aren't the only options on the phone. There's an email app for Exchange, IMAP and POP email accounts, and a separate IM app for Windows Live, AOL and Yahoo instant messaging. The Google options are more feature rich, but the phone does a fine job handling any email or IM account you want to use.

There are plenty of Motorola widgets to help with message handling, but some of these overlapped and could become confusing. There's a status widget to show all of your friends' feeds, and an unread message widget. At a quick glance, it was hard to tell which I was reading, though once you've read all of your unread messages, that widget goes blank. There's also a separate widget for your outgoing messages, and you can choose to update one network at a time or blast Twitter and Facebook with the same status update.

The Motorola Charm offers a universal inbox under the Messaging app. It's not quite universal, more like the entire universe minus Gmail and IM. It collects all of your Twitter DMs, Facebook emails and text messages, both incoming and outgoing, into one convenient list. The phone supports some threaded messaging in both the universal inbox and the simpler text message section. SMS and Facebook conversations are threaded, so messages show up as cartoon speech balloons in a long page. Twitter messages, though, get their own page for some reason.

In any case, the extensive messaging options on the phone can sometimes be overwhelming. Between the widgets, the universal mailbox and the individual apps, there are a lot of ways to have a text conversation. But you don't have to use all of them, you can simply pick your favorite and with so many options, at least you'll never worry about missing anything.

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