The Motorola Atrix 4G made a big splash earlier this year for several reasons: it was the first dual-core Android phone to hit the market, and it transformed into a kind of laptop computer. Even if you ignored the groundbreaking laptop "Webtop" mode, the Atrix 4G was still a very powerful smartphone.
Nonetheless, it became clear early on that the Atrix had plenty of bugs. In our initial review, we noted many minor issues that added up to a somewhat flaky user experience. The worst was how Motorola and AT&T advertised the Atrix as a 4G phone but it didn't deliver 4G speeds. But other issues were similarly annoying. Android Market and Fring crashed, Wi-Fi connections dropped, and a flaky accelerometer rotated the display seemingly without reason. A slew of problems plagued the expensive Webtop dock, notably variable Hulu video frame rates and plenty of crashes with AT&T's U-Verse live TV app, plus Silverlight, Adobe Reader, and RealPlayer plug-ins in Firefox.
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Toward the end of March, Motorola released a firmware update that addressed a number of issues, including Bluetooth, the fingerprint reader, battery life, and general improvements to touch response and application stability. The firmware update also addressed car dock and headphone jack performance, improved hotspot performance in 2G (EDGE) mode, and enabled the Atrix to turn its display off while charging. Unfortunately, most of the bugs we initially saw remained. Some owners around the Web were also reporting random reboots, which is never a good sign.
Gingerbread Update Features
Enter Gingerbead—or Android 2.3, as it's officially known. Motorola's update, which just became available, makes a number of important changes. You can now sideload apps from "unknown sources" like Amazon's or Gameloft's app stores, which is a big step forward.
Motorola said it also upgraded the photo gallery to aggregate photos, friends' photos, and social networking photo comments from Facebook and Picasa. The music player now offers music discovery, letting you access artists, personalized song recommendations, videos, and news and event updates. The phone itself receives a UI makeover, with a simpler home screen design, white menu backgrounds, new dock icons along the bottom, and a more organized app tray that supports groups.
Other upgrades include location-based recommendations (via Yelp and Facebook check-ins), faster Webtop browsing with Firefox 4.0, 1080p HD video playback, multiple recipient email groups, and one-touch conference call access when dialing into bridges. You can now dismiss all notifications in the system tray at once. Behind the scenes, Motorola beefed up the VPN client, device encryption, SD card encryption, remote management support, and remote wipe capabilities.
So does the Atrix 4G Gingerbread update measure up? Let's find out.
I began this test by setting up a Motorola Atrix 4G and the Webtop accessory. My Atrix 4G ran version 4.1.83 of the firmware, and Android version 2.2.2 (Froyo). I confirmed that nearly all of the original bugs were still present, especially the various app crashes and the intermittent Wi-Fi drops. The latter were especially bad; I couldn't even complete my usual benchmark downloads without several restarts in each case. At one point, the Atrix became confused, started downloading two copies of the same benchmark simultaneously, and listed wildly fluctuating percentage completion totals that often froze halfway through.
Streaming TV was also still a mess. For example, it took three minutes to begin playing a Hulu TV show, only to stutter, stumble, and eventually freeze while playing just the initial SyFy logo at the beginning; I eventually just gave up altogether. On the standalone video side, I could play some 720p videos, but none of my test 1080p files worked.
Installing the Gingerbread update was very easy, as it takes place over the air. My phone didn't announce it automatically; I went into Settings -> About Phone -> System Updates, which triggered the update's availability. Motorola recommends you charge the phone first, double check that the SIM is still active, and make sure you're running Blur version 4.1.83 before beginning. You also need a microSD card installed with at least 200MB of free space.
A dialog box stated that it would update Blur version 4.1.83 to 4.5.91. Motorola's site said the update should take about 25 minutes. My timing was thrown off, though, because the download kept freezing; those interrupted Wi-Fi connections struck again, even with the phone placed just a few feet from my router. Nonetheless, the update installation went smoothly once downloaded.
Testing and Conclusions
After the upgrade, the Atrix 4G felt like a new phone. The graded, vibrant icons looked nice. The menu scrolled faster and rebounded more naturally, and a group setting at the top was visible. You can also hold down an icon and change it. I benchmarked the Atrix 4G before and after the update; all of the benchmarks ran at roughly the same speed as before. It's more in terms of perception; the device felt more responsive and polished than it did before.
Multimedia performance improved, but it still wasn't perfect. High definition 1080p videos looked great when played through the Webtop. AT&T U-verse was much more usable; I had no problem streaming an episode of Covert Affairs, both in a window and in full-screen mode. I saw a few occasional stutters, but overall it was tough to distinguish the Atrix-plus-Webtop combination from a real laptop in this regard. But Entertainment Center became less reliable: it crashed repeatedly when trying to bring up the same music tracks I tried back when the system was still running Froyo. And what seemed fast on the Atrix 4G itself felt sluggish through the Webtop; you still won't mistake this for a real laptop in regular use, even with Firefox 4.0 loaded. Still no dice with the Silverlight and Adobe Reader plug-ins, either. (Real discontinued the RealPlayer for Linux plug-in, so I couldn't retest that one.)
The update definitely improved the Atrix experience, but the Atrix is still bleeding-edge technology. The phone worked better and faster, but it still had some bugs, including a new one. We reaffirm our somewhat shaky recommendation of this groundbreaking phone. If you like the Atrix and are willing to use a desktop dock rather than the laptop dock, take a look at the very similar Motorola Photon 4G for Sprint, which adds actual 4G WiMAX and appears to be less buggy.
The jury is still out on whether the Webtop-and-phone combination will revolutionize computing, or just be another interesting niche idea. Even if it's the latter—where it probably will stay at least for now, given the expensive docks—the concept worked much better here than it did with the Celio Redfly and the never-quite-released Palm Foleo. We're certainly on board.
Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2390799,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05039TX1K0000762
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