Motorola Atrix review

Motorola has come out fighting recently. Its Xoom was the first tablet to market with Android 3, and now the Atrix wants to turn the idea of mobile computing on its head. Motorola calls it “the world’s most powerful smartphone”, and with good reason.

This is because as well as being a potent Android smartphone – which we’ll get to later – the Atrix also wants to be your laptop and a replacement for your media-centre PC. That’s quite an ambition, requiring a series of ingenious accessories.

Is it a laptop?

The Motorola Lapdock is useless on its own, but plug the Atrix into the cradle at the rear, open the lid and, hey presto, it becomes a working netbook, complete with 11.6in 1,366 x 768 screen, Qwerty keyboard and a large touchpad and buttons. A pair of internal batteries powers the screen (and tops up your phone’s battery, too), and it has stereo speakers, two USB 2 ports, and a series of tiny LEDs indicating the remaining charge on the front.

It’s nicely made, clad mostly in brushed aluminium, and it’s just 16mm thick and weighs 1.09kg. But if you were hoping for something to replace your netbook, this isn’t it. The problem isn’t battery life – we played our test podcast video on loop and the Lapdock lasted 6hrs 50mins. No, it’s the software.

When the two are connected, the Lapdock eschew the Atrix’s Android UI for an environment called WebTop, which looks like a dumbed-down version of Mac OS X. Practically speaking, all WebTop adds to the phone’s capabilities is a full desktop version of the Firefox browser. You can still access the phone’s functions and apps directly using the provided mobile viewer, but operating Android with a touchpad feels awkward in the extreme.

It’s also slow and unresponsive. The SunSpider test in the WebTop browser took just over six seconds, two seconds slower than in the handset’s native Chrome-based Android browser. Load up a few tabs and you can really feel things slow to a crawl, with sites heavy on the JavaScript, such as Zoho Writer, almost unusable in WebTop mode.

Businesses may be interested to discover that Firefox comes preloaded with the Citrix Connector plugin, allowing access to Citrix’s server-driven virtual desktop infrastructure, but this, too, felt sluggish in use. That’s disappointing, as there’s plenty of raw power: we managed to stream high-quality (non-HD) Flash video via BBC iPlayer and YouTube perfectly smoothly.

While the keyboard is reasonably comfortable, the trackpad is so large we constantly found ourselves brushing against it with our thumbs, sending the cursor hopping mad. You can turn it off, but doing so every time you start typing becomes tiresome.

But the real killer for the Lapdock is the price: charging £300 for something that runs so sluggishly from its master phone, and doesn’t even function at all without it, is patently ridiculous – even more so when you look at current netbook prices.

Is it a media player?

We have fewer misgivings about the HD Multimedia Dock. At only £78 it’s much cheaper than the Lapdock, and you can also get it bundled with a £40 per month Orange contract as part of its Atrix Work & Play kit (along with the more basic charger dock, plus a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse).

It’s a cradle for the Atrix that sports three USB 2 ports, a 3.5mm audio output and an HDMI connector for hooking up to a TV or monitor. When you drop in the phone, it outputs to the big screen with the option of a TV-friendly media-centre interface. It’s still as sluggish in general use as with the Lapdock, but 1080p video streamed smoothly at up to 1080p.

But can it work as a replacement for a proper media streamer or media-centre PC? The answer is no, principally because it baulked at so many video formats. Some WMV and MP4 files played, but we tried a selection of MKVs, AVCHD MPEG4s and HD MPEG2 files, none of which worked. Plus, there’s no streaming integration with online services such as BBC iPlayer or YouTube, or DLNA support for streaming from other PCs or NAS drives.

Or is it just a phone?

Of the Atrix’s three core functions, it’s only really the smartphone part that succeeds. The chassis isn’t as sleek as the iPhone 4, but we like the soft-touch plastic and the fake carbon-effect patterning.

Its 4in Gorilla Glass screen is the highlight, sporting a 960 x 540 (quarter Full HD) resolution that comes as close to the iPhone 4’s pixel density as any smartphone has managed so far. The sub-pixel array has an extra white pixel for every RGB triplet, which makes things slightly grainy up-close, but it does give it a tremendous 598cd/m[sup]2[/sup] maximum brightness. It isn’t as colourful as the screen on the Samsung Galaxy S II, but it’s pin-sharp, and all those extra pixels make the Android desktop feel roomier than usual.

Thanks to a dual-core 1GHz Tegra II processor, performance in Android 2.2 is fantastic, with menus and web pages responding the instant you push, pull or pinch them. The Atrix loaded the BBC desktop homepage in an average of six seconds, and gained a respectable 2,779 points in the Android-specific Quadrant test. It isn’t quite up there with the 1.2GHz dual-core Galaxy S II, but it isn’t far off it.

After our 24-hour run-down test the Atrix retained 60% battery life to the Samsung’s 50%. But the 5-megapixel, 720p camera can’t match the Samsung’s 8-megapixel, 1080p unit. Stills and movies look fine in good light, but they’re much grainier and noisier than the Samsung’s (and the iPhone 4’s) in low light. The dual-LED flash helps, but not much.

No Motorola smartphone would be complete without the Motoblur Android skin, and you also get Swype. It’s also worth noting the unusual power switch, which doubles as a fingerprint reader for quickly unlocking the phone.

The verdict

The Motorola Atrix on its own would have looked excellent had the faster Samsung Galaxy S II not raised the bar this month. As it is, it looks good, which for a minimum £35 per month doesn’t exactly set our pulses racing.

As for the whole Atrix ecosystem, we really do like the concept – after all, who wouldn’t want to merge laptop, PC, media centre and phone? Alas, none of it works well enough, and the prices are far too high to offer any kind of “give it a go” appeal. We applaud Motorola for trying, but for true mobile computing we recommend you stick to a smartphone and netbook.

Details
Cheapest price on contract	Free
Contract monthly charge	£35.00
Contract period	24 months
Contract provider	www.orange.co.uk
Battery Life
Talk time, quoted	9hrs
Standby, quoted	16 days, 17hrs
Physical
Dimensions	64 x 11.5 x 118mm (WDH)
Weight	0g
Touchscreen	yes
Primary keyboard	On-screen
Core Specifications
RAM capacity	1,000MB
Camera megapixel rating	5.0mp
Front-facing camera?	yes
Video capture?	yes
Display
Screen size	4.0in
Resolution	540 x 960
Landscape mode?	yes
Other wireless standards
Bluetooth support	yes
Integrated GPS	yes
Software
OS family	Android