Motorola Atrix – Netbook or Smartphone?

Motorola engineers seem to have gone into overdrive these few months and after releasing the perfect table to date, the Motorola Xoom, they wanted to outdo themselves and make a completely new device that is a hybrid between a netbook and a smartphone… thus the Atrix is born.

More than a phone but not quite a netbook  it seems, even thaw it has a major advantage above every other smartphone (even in hardware specs) and can transform into a netbook; after testing it I have to say it’s a rather sluggish netbook with a second hand feeling to it.

Let me expand the idea; first let’s look at the Atrix from a mobile phone point of view.

Specifications Motorola Atrix :

As you can see the specifications are really good, so good that they surpass Google’s Choice of Nexus S, the Atrix is even faster than the Google flagship phone even thaw it runs on Android 2.2

The interface is with Motorola’s Blur widgets that help for a really smooth transition and a very nice feeling to it and the dual core processor helps in the multi-tasking phone use. Now don’t think you will be able to open apps like IM, Twitter and Gmail all in the same time with no lag, but it surely is a next step to multitask. Motorola even pumped out their assembly line and gave up the cheap plastic for a carbon fiber base case that in my opinion is a win over all the glossy plasticky phones out there.

That being said let’s look at it over a Netbook side of view:

The docking station price is $190 with Bluetooth keyboard, mouse and remote; $130 for the solo compilation. If you consider it comes with a screen also it’s a good deal to buy both of them at a package.

When you dock the phone to the docking station magic happens and your phone is now a Netbook, you can say it’s very very similar to becoming a Chrome OS netbook which is a computer in which you’re sandboxed into a browser that has 2 parts a good one and a bad one. The upside is that it’s a desktop browser. The downside is its Firefox 3.X, that will eat up all your resources and make the whole operation really slow, especially on a mobile processor with limited RAM. Now this issue might be resolved after some software changes in the future like chrome browser or some improvements to Firefox … there is always room for that.

The best part about the docking phase is that your phone will charge in that time, you can receive and do calls via Bluetooth device, and get this; the real major innovation is the Android phone UI witch is mirrored in a window. How cool is that, you can use the mouse to navigate you Phone UI, or the keyboard or the track pad… it’s really a job well done for Motorola.

Same for the multitasking, but here the lesson is much harder, because if you start 1 application let’s say it works rather ok, but if you try here to multi task your patience will be put to the test and trust me if you don’t like to wait this isn’t the netbook for you.

Another issue would be the slow loading time for movies on YouTube, if you got for the 720p take you time again, while the 3G network struggles to keep up with 2500 kbps download and 300 kbps upload.

On the other hand the battery life is really long about 7 hours or so, so if you’re stuck in a airport terminal it might help a lot to have a netbook like this and help the time pass by more quickly.

All in all I have to say I loved the phone with its huge resolution display and its 1 Ghz dual core processor that speeds everything up at a very decent price may I add. But as far as using it for a Netbook combo, I wouldn’t go as far and rather prefer using a tablet or a usual netbook for that job. Motorola you’re on the right way just make some more adjustments and this might be another wonderful landmark product.

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