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Review: Motorola Devour

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Android's basic interface and menus are quite dynamic, and Motorola's Motoblur interface adds plenty of useful features. There are plenty of ways to customize the Motorola Devour's 5-pane home screen. You can add shortcuts to open applications, Web pages, music playlists and more. You can dial a contact quickly by tapping a shortcut on the home screen. You can even add a shortcut that will open Google Maps and start navigating from your current location to a preset destination, a shortcut I use quite frequently.

Beyond shortcuts, there are plenty of active widgets available that will continually update with new information. One widget, the so-called Happenings widget, collects all your friends' updates from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Another widget, Motoblur's Social Status widget, lets you update these services all at once with the same message, or individually. A News widget gathers articles from RSS feeds. Best of all, these widgets look great and are easy to use. You get one update at a time directly on your home screen, but if you tap the widget you get a simple slideshow view that lets you flick left and right to read more. No need to open a separate app or your Web browser, all that information is collected on the front page.

Most of the phone's settings are all buried in the Settings menu, but these can be difficult to navigate, as well. For instance, you can adjust power usage in the “Battery Manager” menu, but if you want to see which apps and features are draining your battery quickest, you have to find the “Battery Use” option under the “About Phone” menu. I also wish that these settings menus were consistent between Android devices, but they're different, in somewhat subtle ways, on every Android device I've used (which is almost all of them). Of course, this won't be a problem until you buy your second Android phone.

 
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