Ok, the problem with Blur is it's terribly made. If this were about Sense or even TouchWiz, I'd argue that at least they're decent. Blur is just poorly made with redundancies and sloppy design. Look at the Engadget review. I mean seriously, wtf Blur. Yes Launcher Pro alone does a better job.
So, what is it that is so bad with Blur? I have several devices on hand that use it, along with all the other popular Android skins(wait, actually I don't have a Streak on hand atm, but noone ever talks about Stage for some reason). What makes Blur inferior to the other skins as you see it?
I wouldn't say LP is better than Sense.
I think you have me confused with someone else, I like ADW better then LP(preference issue entirely) although I do like them both better then Sense, but SPB is an entirely different level of UI IMO.
Blur was not the launching point for Android. The Droid 1 didn't even have it. And sorry, but Motorola was not the main launching point for Android. Maybe in the US it was for the DROID campaign
Close to 10% of the Android market is still on 1.5/1.6- the Droid launched with 2.0. Given a lot of phones running the older versions were updated, and a lot of people who had one of those phones has upgraded by now, the Android market was actually quite large prior to the Droid hitting(although the Droid clearly had a major impact).
Sense annoyances for me, a big one that it shares with Blur- nigh unuseable quick launcher. Great, I get crappy functions I rarely need and am stuck with them. That element alone is a big enough factor for me to dump either one of them. Both Blur and Sense suck the same in that aspect, a bit of the Apple mentality unforunately.
Sense makes their widgets too big with enough flash to outdo DOS, by a little, but still look outdated compared to something like SPB and they don't offer any great levels of functionality. If you are going to have huge widgets, make them impressive or very useful(I'll give them props for their clock/weather widget, that one is pretty decent), don't make them bland, huge and boring which is what they currently are. By comparion, Blur's widgets are at least more compact and don't take over panels for trivial tasks. If I have to chose between not nice to look at and small, or not nice to look at and huge, I'll take the smaller option.
I'd like to get a full Sense UI port to another manufacturers handset at some point and see what their deal is with battery life. Either HTC has the poorest hardware engineers in the business, or something is seriously wrong with Sense in terms of how it utilizes resources. From modding HTC phones, I'm thinking the truth is a little bit of both going on. This is one area that Blur humiliates Sense, and one that I consider a
huge issue. Those mid 90s looking giant widgets aren't remotely close to cool enough to justify 5 hours of light useage on a high end device in late 2010.
So, the dock sucks, all but one of the widgets are medicore at best, it is terrible on battery life and the quick launch bar is a joke. Performance wise it is directly comparable to Blur running comparable devices side by side although I'm waiting for HTC to get a true 2011 class phone out as right now the fastest example of both leaves Sense looking downright sluggish(TBolt v Atrix).
In terms of overall launchers I'd give SPB a 9(needs more widgets and more options on some of the ones it already has, other then that spectacular), ADW a 7, LP a 6.5, Blur/TouchWiz a solid 5, stock a 4.5 and Sense a 4.0. If Sense could display battery life comparable to Blur on a comparable handset I'd probably give it a slight edge thanks to the weather/clock widget which you need to spend money on to match with Blur(Stage, for the record, I'd have around a 6, that would push up to around an 8 if it had close the customization options that ADW/LP have).
Edit- Oh yeah, one of the reasons SPB spanks the rest so badly is that it has full GPU acceleration unlike the others.
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