{"id":9921,"date":"2011-02-17T12:57:20","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T12:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gadgets.itwriting.com\/?p=112"},"modified":"2011-02-17T12:57:20","modified_gmt":"2011-02-17T12:57:20","slug":"motorola-atrix-the-future-of-the-laptop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/9921-motorola-atrix-the-future-of-the-laptop.html","title":{"rendered":"Motorola Atrix – the future of the laptop?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I took a closer look at the Motorola Atrix on display here at Mobile World Congress. This is a smartphone built on NVidia\u2019s Tegra 2 dual-core chipset. I\u2019m interested in the concept as much as the device. Instead of carrying a laptop and a smartphone, you use the smartphone alone when out and about, or dock to a laptop-like screen and keyboard when at a desk. The dock has its own 36Wh battery so you are not tied to mains power.<\/p>\n

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The Atrix has a few extra tricks as well. HDMI out enables HD video. An audio dock converts it to a decent portable music player.<\/p>\n

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The smartphone also morphs into a controller if you use Motorola\u2019s alternative dock, designed for fully external keyboard and screen.<\/p>\n

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It is a compelling concept, though there is a little awkwardness in the way Motorola has implemented it. The Atrix has two graphical shells installed. One is Android. The other is a an alternative Linux shell which Motorola calls Webtop. While you can freely download apps to Android, the Webtop has just a few applications pre-installed by Motorola, and with no official way to add further applications. One of them is Firefox, so you can browse the web using a full-size browser.<\/p>\n

The disconnect between Android and Webtop is mitigated by the ability to run Android within Webtop, either in its own smartphone-sized window, or full screen.<\/p>\n

Personally I prefer the idea of running Android full screen, even though it is not designed for a laptop-sized screen, as I do not like the idea of having two separate sets of apps. That seems to miss the point of having a single device. On the other hand, Webtop does enable non-Android apps to run on Atrix, so I can see the value it adds.<\/p>\n

Leaving that aside, I do think this is a great idea and one that I expect to become important. After all, if you do not think  Tegra 2 is quite powerful enough, you could wait for some future version built on the quad-core Tegra 3 (name not yet confirmed), which NVidia says is five times faster, and which may turn up in Smartphones late in 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I took a closer look at the Motorola Atrix on display here at Mobile World Congress. This is a smartphone built on NVidia\u2019s Tegra 2 dual-core chipset. I\u2019m interested in the concept as much as the device. Instead of carrying a laptop and a smartphone, you use the smartphone alone when out and about, or … Continue reading Motorola Atrix – the future of the laptop?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1142,56,1152],"tags":[143,599,1342,839],"class_list":["post-9921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gadgets","category-mobile","category-smartphones","tag-android","tag-mobile","tag-motorola-atrix","tag-smartphones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}