Motorola Atrix review

The Motorola Atrix, the company's latest Android smartphone, can also be used as a laptop. Unfortunately, it is more a Frankenstein's monster than the best of both worlds as we find out in our review.

IT Pro Verdict

The Motorola Atrix is a decent smartphone, but with the exception of the fingerprint reader there's little to recommend it over our favourite dual-core Android phone, Samsung's Galaxy S2. We liked the idea of the Lapdock, if only because it could reduce the number of computers IT departments would have to manage, but it's implemented so badly that we can't possibly recommend it to anyone in its current state. You'd be much better off buying a netbook to accompany the Atrix or indeed any other smartphone.

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Web apps such as Google Docs, WordPress and Simplenote ran so sluggishly that they were unusable Firefox often struggled to keep up with our typing.

The SunSpider JavaScript benchmark revealed that at least part of the problem lies with poor JavaScript rendering speeds. The phone's standard Android WebKit browser rendered SunSpider in 4140.6ms, but the Lapdock was around 33% slower, crawling along at 6146.1ms.

Playing online video was also a disappointment. Standard definition videos from YouTube and iPlayer played smoothly, but high definition videos and many of the standard definition clips on ITPRO dropped so many frames that they were unwatchable slideshows. Since high definition H264 and Divx clips stored locally played back flawlessly, we suspect the problem lies with software, such as Flash Player, or the operating system itself.

Everything is controlled using the large touchpad and keyboard. The keyboard feels responsive and has a standard layout. Unfortunately, the keys are a little too small which makes typos easier to make but typing is still faster and more accurate than it is on a touchscreen keyboard. The touchpad is large, but the buttons feel far too stiff and the tracking is surprisingly jerky and slow, even on the fastest setting. Even more annoyingly, brushing against the touchpad accidentally can send the cursor flying across the screen moving your text insertion caret leading to some hilariously mistyped sentences.

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