Just Duke - Mostly Tech Ponderings

Yesterday morning I was eating a bowl of cereal and decided to check and see if AT&T might be ready to send me Gingerbread on my Atrix. To my shock, they were! I started the download and then started Googling it and sure enough, it was being rolled out. I also Googled "unrooting" because I was a little concerned that my Gingerbreak hack might interfere with the process! I found several articles that assured me that Gingerbread would overwrite the present root. To this point, I have felt some frustration. I mean, I had Gingerbread on my Nexus, when it died. So I buy a brand new Atrix, touted as state of the art, but it took months and months to roll out the latest software upgrade. But, I degress . . .

The install went just fine, but I did have a problem with the external card. Not all apps were recognized by the phone. But if I re-installed them, then my data within those apps were recognized from the card. Not all apps were affected, but several were. Motorola took this opportunity to improve several blur related apps. I can honestly say that the gallery has been improved quite a bit! And I didn't think it was bad before! Besides a new look it is also tied to social network photos. It's pretty to look at and works! As for the rest of blur? Well, it's blur. Sense is about the only overlay that I do like. But I prefer no overlay what so ever. 

Several of the screens are semi-transparent, and in the case of notificatons, the font is smaller. Not a good thing for my aging eyes, but I'm hoping I get used to it. Moto saw it fit to change up quite a bit of the navigation within the device. Apps now have their own button. Speaking of apps, Moto has added an ability to "group" a set of apps. So when you pull up your app list, you can filter based upon how you have grouped them. I have a photos app group and a Games group. I like this! Many of the icons have changed. Again, I'm not sure that is a good or a bad thing. In the case of the browser icon, it now adds that AT&T globe icon. This is certainly a bad thing!

Over all, I'm enjoying the upgrade! Everything is good to go, except for WiFi tethering. I'll need root access to get that one back up and running. I've looked at a couple of them, but I'm just not confident that these solutions are mature enough. I can live without root. In fact, the only reason I rooted before was to have the ability to use the Atrix as a hotspot. Something that I don't need often, but when I need it, it sure is nice. I wish the carriers would figure this out and offer a one day access plan, or a one week plan. Adding this to service is something that I can't justify when I only use it a couple of times a year for maybe a couple of hours. 

Here are some screen shots of my home screens: