MWC 2011: Motorola updates Motoblur, announces developer summits

As if we needed one more bit of Motorola news, this should wrap things up for now. Motorola is making some serious software upgrades, and it has announced a number of international summits to get developers started.

First, Motoblur is getting a number of new features focused on social networking. All of them tie into social networking, but Connected Gallery could be the most sociable as it merges photos and videos from your mobile device with online albums belonging to yourself and friends on Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and other photo-sharing sites. Comments and other info can be served up in push notifications to conserve data usage.

That's followed by Connected Music, which lets users get recommendations for new songs, purchase them and track what friends are listening to. Additionally, the location-based Aloqa lets third-party apps utilize the user's location, identity and social relationships in order to bring up info about places, events and other opportunities nearby.

Other Motorola updates include the Media Link 1.5 upgrade for iTunes and Windows Media Player transfers, which is available for Mac users now and PC users in March.

Finally, if you're a developer interested in working with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), MOTODEV is holding summits worldwide starting March 1 in San Francisco, followed by meetings in Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul, Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. To learn more about creating apps for the Xoom tablet and Atrix 4G smartphone, you can sign up now.