Motorola Atrix - Versatile Shapeshifter

Playing Dress Up with Atrix

Motorola’s affair with Android has been a tumultuous one, with and . With a refined MOTOBLUR UI and top-of-the-line hardware specifications, will the tech giant finally make peace with its newest dual-core smartphone, the Motorola Atrix? That's we intend to find out in this review. To get you started, we've also got a quick overview and usability video of the Atrix in action with its interesting Lapdock accessory.

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Off the cuff, the NVIDIA Tegra 2 powered Motorola Atrix spots a particularly uninspired black-themed design and isn’t likely to stand out amidst its flashier, dressed-in-aluminum counterparts. The phone is predominantly plastic, which explains its light 135g body. Nonetheless, the Atrix feels sturdy and comfortably-sized, so there aren’t many complaints here.

The front is predominantly covered by the Atrix’s gigantic 4-inch Gorilla Glass protected qHD (960 x 540 pixels) touchscreen, one of the smartphone’s major selling points. The capacitive screen is accompanied with a row of touch controls at the bottom that are properly spread out and respond faithfully to our prodding and tapping.

The controls layout on the Atrix is fairly straightforward and run-of-the-mill. The HDMI and MicroUSB ports are lined neatly on its left profile with volume controls on its right. A 3.5mm audio port sits on the top right of the smartphone.

As far as design is concerned, we've two major complaints. Firstly that there isn’t a shutter button and secondly, the power/lock button is awkwardly positioned. If not for the fact that the latter doubles up as a fingerprint scanner, we would have dismissed it as a poor choice of location. As it's positioned on a slope, it makes pressing the button rather inconvenient.

Of course, the other exciting aspect of the Atrix is that it comes with accessories that transform the phone into another gadget altogether. While this concept isn’t exactly new with third-party accessory manufactures creating keyboard and charging docks, what Motorola has done is to try and make this mainstream. With the Lapdock accessory, you get a larger working screen, keyboard, more ports and an integrated battery.

Getting Ready for MotoBlur

The beauty of the Android platform is that it allows manufacturers to dress their phones up with customized UIs, and the Atrix is no exception. The MOTORBLUR UI comes with a strong emphasis on social media, with customized widgets that allows for easy one tap connectivity – be it through social networks, reading status updates and so forth. Here, we'll give you the lowdown on its key features.

The UI also comes with a an all-in-one inbox of sorts that combines Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and text messaging (SMS).

 Motorola-specific widgets can be resized freely; these include a mixture of widgets for settings, social networking and informative purposes (weather for example).

The Atrix has some nifty software additions also seen on previous MOTOROLA handsets – built-in SWYPE capabilities, the MOTOBLUR UI and the nifty Moto Phone Portal app. The inclusion of SWYPE on Android handsets isn’t a new thing, but it is still a welcomed addition on the Atrix. Apart from the option of using the standard Motorola QWERTY keyboard, users can easily choose to rely on the SWYPE keyboard.



The Moto Phone Portal app allows users to organize your phone’s contents (pictures, contacts, SMSes, calls) or reply messages through either an USB or Wi-Fi connection on your PC browser.

Dockin' on

Of course, the other exciting aspect of the Atrix is that it comes with an accessory that transforms the phone into another gadget altogether. As shown in brief on the previous page, the accompanying Lapdock looks exactly like a notebook/netbook, but comes with a unique preposition – it requires the Atrixin order to run. The Lapdock comes with an 11.6-inch screen, keyboard, touchpad, a built-in 36Wh three-cell battery and a dock positioned at the back for the Atrix. Notice that the Lapdock does not have any processing platform. Instead, it's merely a shell unit that extends the usability of Atrix, be it for recharging the phone, or for extended usage like content consumption, emails and other productivity tasks. As such, the Atrix smartphone is still the brains of the Lapdock which comes to life once the phone is plugged in. Upon docking, the phone launches the Webtop app immediately to manage your device. On the screen itself, you will see a Linux screen with your Atrix’s Android window opened.

Generally, we liked the experience on the Lapdock, but it takes some time getting used to its smaller keyboard keys. Do also note that the Internet experience can be slightly sluggish at times since the Lapdock is relying solely on the Atrix’s dual-core processor.

Benchmarking the Motorola ATRIX

We mentioned earlier in previous reviews that we have adopted a few benchmark tests specific to the Android platform for a few reasons. With the Google Android platform maturing so quickly, choosing a suitable phone in a growing sea of Android devices with close to identical specs is extremely difficult. To add on, with manufacturers jumping on the dual-core processing bandwagon, these results will give a gauge of how they will fare against their lesser endowed counterparts. Hopefully, these benchmarks will allow for a clearer picture on which smartphone is worth your while.

Within this page, we'll be looking at two specific benchmarks, both of which are downloadable via the Android Market.

• Quadrant: It measures the device's performance based on its CPU, I/O and GPU. Simply put, Quadrant is a benchmark that gives you a general idea of how your device performs against other Android devices.
  
   
• NeoCore: It is targeted towards the device's GPU performance. This is especially important given how smartphones of today have evolved into an alternative, high-powered device that dabbles in heavy graphical interfaces and gaming.
  
   

Do note that the above two benchmarks are not absolute in measuring performance, but they give you a good rough estimate of how the device performs. Our tests were conducted on devices from a fresh reboot on a stock firmware. To show how the Motorola Atrix performed against similar smartphones, we compared its results against the following high-end Android devices - LG Optimus 2X, Sony Ecrisson Arc, and Samsung Nexus S.

Do note that the real fight here is between the Motorola Atrix and the LG Optimus 2X, since both phones are equipped with identical dual-core processors from NVIDIA. The Atrix also comes with twice the RAM than the LG Optimus 2X has.The former unsurprisingly surpasses the latter's scores in the Quadrant benchmark test, and needless to say, is almost double the scores of the single-core smartphones, Arc and Nexus S. However, taking a look at the Neocore benchmark results, the Atrix finishes last, even lagging slightly behind both the Arc and the Nexus S. This is mostly due to its higher screen resolution (the Atrix comes with a screen resolution of 540 x 960 pixels) .

We must say that having both a dual-core chipset and 1GB RAM does speed things up on a smartphone. As a result, the Atrix ran smooth and loads extremely swiftly. We experienced no lags in performance and crashes while running various apps during our test run.

Multimedia & Battery Life Performance

As mentioned earlier, the Atrix’s gigantic 4-inch qHD touchscreen, coated with a layer of tough Gorilla Glass, is a huge plus in our books. With a high resolution of 960×540 pixels, text and pictures were crisp and sharp with excellent color rendered on the smartphone. While its LCD screen loses out to its AMOLED counterparts slightly in terms of contrast levels, the Atrix is still a formidable competitor.

We haven't had good impressions of previous flagship Motorola Android phones with regards to camera performance (see Motorola Defy and Milestone 2) so we were hoping that this time, the flagship Atrix might change our opinion.

We found that the overall photographic performance for the Atrix was rather lackluster, one that was especially hampered by its finicky white balance issues and a strange recurring green tint. To add on, the camera app that came with the Atrix only offers basic settings like resolution and storage location and none of the more advanced settings like ISO or face detection which are normally found on high-end smartphones of Atrix's caliber.

Next up, we compared the Motorola Atrix's battery performance with a selected group of devices chosen based on their similarities across battery capacities, display sizes, resolution and processing power. This standard battery test consists of looping a 240 x 320 pixels resolution video clip at 100% volume and screen brightness, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth active with push email or data being pulled at regular intervals. For this handset, we compared it against other similar Android devices such as the LG Optimus 2X, Sony Ericsson Arc and Samsung Nexus S.

Unsurprisingly, the Motorola Atrix came in first place, with a battery life of 369 minutes on its 1930mAh batter - the highest battery capacity out of the group. However, it only lasted about half an hour more than the 1500mAh-equipped Xperia Arc with the rest of its comrades trailing slightly behind. We would have expected the Atrix to have lasted a wee bit longer given its high battery capacity, in spite of the fact that it comes with a 4.0-inch screen of a higher resolution of 540 x 960 pixels and a dual-core processor that saps more battery life. Power consumption is also a tad higher for the same reasons as mentioned above and it's probably why the Atrix was endowed with a higher rated battery.

The Atrix is one of the two heavier handsets (though not by much) in this comparison, but came in second in terms of battery life to volume ratio. However, because its battery capacity is much higher than the rest, it is unsurprising that it would have done better than most of the other smartphones. But to give it credit, the Motorola Atrix did quite well over its closest competitor, the LG Optimus 2X.

Overall, the Atrix did fairly well, but we were expecting more. Nonetheless, while rationing the phone for normal day-to-day operations, the phone could last for at least a full working day. If you are a light user, you can possibly stretch it out to about 1.5 day's worth of usage, especially if you only turn on your 3G periodically.

Is the Atrix for You?

The Atrix is picking up the pace for Motorola after a rather lacklustre Android-backed Milestone 2 - and honestly, does a pretty good job at it. The former seem to embody all that of which that constitutes a high-end smartphone - a dual-core processor, a whopping 1GB of working memory, a huge 4.0-inch qHD touchscreen and so forth. We must not forget that the Atrix also comes with some cool software features like its own MOTOBLUR UI, the Moto Phone Portal app, support for XviD and DivX files and so forth. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that the Atrix isn't just an empty bag of promises. It delivers commendably in most aspects (smooth and speedy navigation, a clear screen, no random lock-ups and crashes) while under-delivering in just a handful of aspects (Android 2.2 out-of-the-box, camera capabilities). We also considered the fact that its integration with the Lapdock was a fairly smooth and intuitive one; you simply plug in your phone and everything is pretty straightforward from there without complicated user interfaces and such. 



Nonetheless, it is myopic to view the Atrix and its ecosystem of accessories just on its own. With a market soon to be saturated with strong contenders like Samsung GALAXY S II and HTC Sensation, it is essential to pit their merits and weaknesses against the Atrix to make an informed purchase decision. Do you want a bigger SUPER AMOLED Plus screen? Do you prefer the HTC Sense UI to the TouchWiz or does the MOTOBLUR UI work for you? If you have a smaller budget to work with, it is also important to ask yourself: do you actually need the extra horsepower? Aside other deeper hardware considerations, these are some important questions that ought to be faced when more dual-core smartphones with similar specs come to our shores. At the end of the day, if you are looking for a wider mobile experience, the Atrix does fulfill that niche as it comes with two specific docks with two usage perspectives that the other competitors lack. 

To sum it up, the Atrix still stands as a worthy challenger to the brethren of existing and upcoming dual-core smartphones. With its speedy processor, we had no problems with its smooth performance, be it in day-to-day operations like surfing, navigation and even gaming. Aside its mediocre camera and fair battery performances, the Atrix still stands high on our list with its positive features. The smartphone comes at S$988 bundled with the HD Multimedia Dock and S$1288 bundled with the Lapdock.

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