VIEW SLIDESHOW
- Pros
Very fast and powerful. Gorgeous screen. Optional docks turn the phone into a desktop or laptop PC.
- Cons
Buggy. Laptop dock is fatally overpriced.
- Bottom Line
Motorola's Atrix 4G, the unique bleeding-edge superphone that can transform itself into a PC, shows how we'll likely be using our mobile devices in the year 2020. But to get a taste of the future, you'll have to pay, and deal with some bugs along the way.
The Motorola Atrix ($99 with a two-year AT&T contract) is at the forefront of a technology revolution. This powerful cell phone that transforms into a laptop or a desktop PC shows us what could very well be the future of mobile computing. Someday we might all carry a little brain in our pocket that pops into a dock and becomes a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, or a phone, all sharing the same CPU and storage. With the Atrix, though, some of these bleeding-edge features have bugs and rough edges, though the July 2011 Gingerbread 2.3.4 update alleviates many of these (more on this below). AT&T's accessory pricing discourages the use of the Atrix in laptop mode. But that's okay. Even without turning into a desktop or laptop, the Atrix is a top-of-the-line smartphone for the techno-elite.
Given the Atrix's unique nature, we'll start out by outlining the Atrix's "ordinary" phone features, as far as the nation's first dual-core smartphone can be considered ordinary. Then we'll cover the phone's transformation into a laptop and a desktop, and then we'll wrap it up with some pricing concerns and recommendations.
Editor's Note: This review was updated on August 8, 2011 to reflect software updates since the phone's launch.
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Physical Features and Call Quality
To start, the Motorola Atrix is a good-looking phone. At 2.5 by 4.6 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 4.8 ounces, it's clad in smooth black plastic with an attractive fade pattern on the back panel. The 960-by-540 screen is truly beautiful; it's sharper than any other you'll find on a phone, with the exception of Apple's 960-by-640 Retina Display on the iPhone 4 ($199-$699, 4.5 stars). Colors look rich both indoors and out. This isn't a standard Android resolution, but in my tests, I didn't see any problems with third-party Android apps. The oddest physical feature you'll find on the Atrix is a fingerprint reader, which you can use instead of a passcode to unlock the phone. According to Motorola, the fingerprint reader comes at the request of big businesses that want to use the Atrix as a Citrix-based thin client.
Specifications
- Service Provider
- AT&T
- Operating System
- Android OS
- Screen Size
- 4 inches
- Screen Details
- 960x540 IPS LCD capacitive touch screen
- Camera
- Yes
- Network
- GSM, UMTS
- Bands
- 850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100
- High-Speed Data
- GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA
- Processor Speed
- 2 GHz
Call quality wasn't great in my tests, but it was good enough to pass. First, the Atrix tends to over-report signal strength; in my weak-signal test, I saw two bars but couldn't connect calls. The earpiece doesn't get very loud, but it's always loud enough for the given situation, so I suspect the phone has the ability to adapt to the background noise. I heard a slight buzz during very loud transmissions. Voices sound warm and a bit fuzzy, both receiving and sending. The speakerphone is loud, sharp, and sounds excellent, and the Atrix paired easily with an Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars) for both voice calls and music.
The Atrix comes with two (yes, two!) voice dialing systems, both of which you can launch from a Bluetooth headset. There's the standard Google system, which is accurate enough, and Vlingo, which lets you dictate everything from text messages to Web searches. I found the latter to be a bit confusing; it's so open-ended that I wasn't sure what to say without a tutorial.
The Atrix bills itself as a "4G" phone, but just like the HTC Inspire 4G ($99.99, 4 stars), which uses the same modem, it only runs at HSPA 14.4 speeds, which we don't consider 4G. Testing the handset in Manhattan, I saw speeds mostly in the 1.5Mbps range with a peak of 3Mbps, which is good 3G, not 4G. Upload speeds were quite slow, around 200Kbps. That said, the Atrix also works with Wi-Fi 802.11n networks (including 5GHz) and can roam overseas on GSM and HSPA networks. The phone also has a mobile hotspot mode. As for battery life, the Atrix racked up 6 hours and 44 minutes of talk time, which is a very good showing for a powerful 3G phone.
CPU, Android, and Multimedia
The first dual-core smartphone to hit the U.S., the Atrix now runs Android 2.3 on the Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset. Tegra 2 has dual ARM Cortex-A9 cores running at 1GHz each, and it's competitive with other top-of-the-line, dual-core smartphones. CPU and memory access benchmarks stayed relatively even after we applied the Gingerbread update. Either way, graphics benchmarks were on par with dual-core phones with lower-resolution screens, showing that Tegra can push more pixels with less sweat. This processor is wicked, and can take anything Android can throw at it.
Tegra 2 brings a few visible differences to Android. Most notably, Flash runs much, much better than it has on any smartphone I've ever seen before. Flash elements on Web pages pop up more quickly and interaction is much smoother. Video playback is also a major strength here. The Atrix was the first phone that could handle my 1080p HD test files, in both WMV and MPEG4 formats. (This becomes important when you hook the phone up to an HDTV.)
There's lots of room on the Atrix; the phone comes with about 10GB free, and you can add a MicroSD card up to 32GB into a slot under the back cover. The phone can act as a flash drive for a PC or sync with Windows Media Player, and Motorola's Phone Portal software lets you manage your address book or text messages from your PC over a USB or Wi-Fi connection.
Beyond Android, Motorola and AT&T have each added their own software here. Motorola's contribution is Blur, its social-networking suite. While I like Blur on some midrange phones, here I wish I could just turn it off, download my own apps, and save the phone's battery. The Gingerbread update refined the look of the home screens, smoothed out how you switch between them, and also smoothed over menu scrolling so that it has a little elasticity to it. As usual, AT&T litters the phone with bloatware like a bar-code scanner and a Yellow Pages app, but none of it really gets in the way.
Most of the bugs we originally ran into back in February disappeared with the Gingerbread update, but some remain. AT&T's U-Verse Live TV streaming app still isn't perfect. It's sluggish to start up and sometimes stutters a bit, but it actually plays smoothly now, even in full screen mode. The update seems to have cured the Atrix's display orientation and intermittent Wi-Fi connection issues, but it was still hit-or-miss whether the Webtop would activate properly after I docked the Atrix. Despite the various improvements, there's still a bit of a cumulative sense of rough edges with the Atrix.
There's a 5-megapixel camera on the back of the Atrix, and a pointless VGA camera on the front of the phone. Camera performance, much like call quality, is just fine, not excellent. I got bluish, slightly soft pictures with a 0.7-second shutter delay. Not iPhone-level awesome, but perfectly acceptable for a camera phone. I was much more impressed with the phone's video prowess; I was able to capture smooth 720p videos at 30 frames per second, both indoors and out.
The Laptop Dock
Standing alone, the Atrix is a top-notch Android phone, but it isn't a game changer. The optional laptop and desktop docks are what change things: they make a strong argument that you don't need another computer. All you need is a phone.
The Atrix laptop dock is a slim, beautiful, 2.34-pound notebook constructed of metal and soft plastic. The build is close to perfect. It looks like a true notebook, but the laptop dock has no processor, no memory, and no storage, it's just a shell. To use it, you pop open a flap on the back and plug in your Atrix. Suddenly, the dock comes to life in something Motorola calls the "Webtop Application," which looks like a full-fledged version of Linux that's running Android in a window. (Dock pricing is outlined on the next page.)
The laptop is enjoyable to type on. It has a very large trackpad, and the 11.6-inch 1366-by-768 display is sharp. I wish the right Shift key was a bit larger, but, admittedly, that's a minor quibble. The dock also has two USB ports on the back; you can plug in a mouse, a USB flash drive or a card reader. There are no speakers, audio comes through the phone's speakerphone.
The dock has its own battery, which charges the Atrix and can run for about eight hours, according to Motorola. When the Atrix is docked, it first uses the dock's battery, so when you remove the phone, it's always fully charged. And when you charge the dock, it charges the phone's battery first. A small button on the front of the dock shows battery status.
Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2379916,00.asp
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