Motorola Atrix - Even Though I Would Never Buy a Motorola Product, This was the Coolest Thing at CES 2011!

The Motorola Atrix is a new generation of smart phone, with tons of power and some cool new features. This phone sports beefy hardware with a Tegra dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and support for up to 48GB of memory, a 4-inch QHD display (or 960 x 540), a front-facing VGA camera and 5-megapixel with an LED flash, a 1930 mAh battery, fingerprint login security, and Android 2.2 froyo. The most amazing thing is watching it plugged into a dock (with a large LCD monitor, keyboard, and mouse attached), or a laptop dock (essentially a laptop screen, keyboard, trackpad, and battery, with the Atrix phone acting as the actual computer). Seeing this in action really makes me think of the future when cell phones will totally replace computers for most people. 

Now the one problem with this phone is that it looked great at the CES tech demo, but in the real world I can see it starting to slow down a bit. This is the first time a smart phone is really trying to pull double duty as a desktop/laptop computer, and although these dual core Tegra 2 phones are insanely powerful for mobile phones, they are a bit sluggish for a regular computer. The other huge problem is that there aren't really any good apps out right now on the Android market that would take advantage of a keyboard and mouse setup like this. I would wait another year for the next generation of these phones that will be even more powerful and more ready to step into the role of a laptop, and by then some great apps will hopefully have come out. In the meantime i'd focus my attention on a good tablet (the iPad 2 is shaping up to be pretty skookum, at least in the rumours) and just get a decent phone that works well as a PHONE (the LG Optimus T/One is my favourite). Oh, did I mention that Motorola is notorious for NOT updating their phones to new software? Have fun being stuck at android 2.2 for eternity on your brand new Motorola Atrix phone (did I also mention that motorola locks the bootloaders of their phones, so you CANNOT install custom roms?). Android is great and I love my LG Optimus T, but Android is in what I would call an 'advanced beta' stage, and at this point updates are mandatory for an overall good experience. This is the one major reason (aside from the awesome app store) that I think Apple is winning the smart phone / tablet war (I will make a detailed post about this coming up).

(Motorola Atrix phone, shown docked to it's laptop accessory)

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/motorola-atrix-4g-hd-multimedia-dock-and-laptop-dock-hands-on/