Motorola Atrix is an Android phone that runs on AT&T’s network. The phone itself is a powerful device, the first U.S. smartphone to run on a dual-core processor. It can also be paired with an unusual accessory called a laptop dock – it’s like a laptop in appearance but doesn’t work unless the Atrix is attached.
Once the phone is attached then the dock works like a netbook, a scaled down laptop intended mostly for websurfing. The dock’s 11.6 inch screen was designed for easier websurfing than on the Atrix phone’s smaller 4 inch screen and it sports a Qwerty keyboard that is aimed at making tasks like emailing much easier than on the phone’s touchscreen.
So how well does it work?
With barely a day to play with both devices, our tests were pretty limited but they lasted long enough for us to form a strong first impression: The phone and lapdoc worked very well when connected to a network but, that was the stumbling block.
Put simply, there really was no way to tell if and when the AT&T cellular network was going to give a strong enough signal for us to get a stable Web connection. Yes, it’s not very original to whine about AT&T’s network performance — which is often lambasted by iPhone customers — but it definitely colored our first impression of the devices.
First we tried the Atrix in a mid-town Manhattan high-rise office building where the initial connection was good enough for web surfing – I found the location of the local post office and Macy’s in short order. So far so good.
