MOTOROLA ATRIX 4G

The Motorola ATRIX 4G is the fastest smartphone not yet on the market. Come March 6th, however, it will be. AT&T has landed a screamingly fast Android device courtesy of Motorola, and that’s not all. The device is so powerful that it can power a laptop with full Firefox browser, and spit out 1080p video like it’s nothing.

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The Motorola ATRIX 4G is one of the world’s fastest smartphone, literally. With a 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor, it’s a screamer. So much so, it can power a full netbook-like laptop accessory (we’ll touch on that later). As far as other specifications go, it’s one of the few Android handsets to feature a whopping 1GB of RAM. Rounding out the feature set is a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash and 720p video recording, the first qHD (quarter HD) display, second microphone for noise cancellation, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, front-facing video camera, HDMI port, and a fingerprint scanner for security that doubles as the on/off button

This is where the phone extends beyond a phone into something more, and it gets really interesting. As you might have heard and seen, the Motorola ATRIX has a couple accessory friends, and one of them is a laptop dock — a full fledged computer powered by the phone itself. Motorola told us that there is practically nothing in the laptop dock — no memory, no processor, nothing. In addition to containing basically an 11.6-inch screen, full keyboard, and built-in battery, the laptop dock actually doesn’t skimp on some essentials. The keyboard is backlit (who’d have thunk), there is an oversized trackpad, and it’s blended together in black aluminum and soft touch rubber.

A couple annoyances include the fact that the trackpad is not multitouch, which is a pretty big issue for scrolling — and we feel like a missed opportunity to extend gestures from the laptop dock to the phone. Since the phone literally runs and is displayed on the laptop screen in it’s own window, you have to literally click and drag your finger to swipe on the phone’s display — a nice little two finger swipe gesture would have been great there, for instance. It’s also very cumbersome to use the left and right mouse trackpad buttons as they are hard to push and don’t have great tactile feedback

The initial honeymoon period with the laptop dock quickly wore off, and here’s why… When purchased with the ATRIX, the laptop dock is bundled for $499 ($199 for the device, $299 for the laptop dock). Purchased separately, the laptop dock is priced at $499. Let’s throw out the possibility of buying the laptop dock separately since in our minds, that’s out of the question. The question is if the laptop dock — a single purpose accessory for your smartphone — is worth $300, and we’d unfortunately have to say that we don’t think it is. While on paper it sounds great, and even in person it looks amazing, most of the excitement is lost when you use the laptop dock. We aren’t in love with the keyboard or the trackpad, and navigation was a frustrating experience for us. Not because of the software or processor, but because of the hardware on the laptop. Additionally, while you have your phone front and center with a full-fledged Firefox browser, that’s all you get and that’s not going to be enough for most people.

Pretty cool but I'll pass.

-AL