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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Powering ahead

One good thing about the Lapdock is that it can charge the Atrix from its own battery or, if your phone's battery is fully charged, provide extra power when you need it most. When looping a H264 video, the phone's battery lasted a lengthy seven hours and 23 minutes. When connected to the Lapdock, the video played for another eight hours and 34 minutes for a total battery life of just under 16 hours which is impressive.

The Atrix also managed a lengthy result in our audio playback battery test lasting 52 hours and 11 minutes, even longer than the vaunted iPhone 4, no doubt due to the whopping 1930mAh battery. However, in more realistic everyday use of light web browsing and making occasional phone calls the battery only just lasted a full 24 hours, so keeping a charger handy would be very wise, especially when using more demanding apps.

So what's our verdict?

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.

Connectivity: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 850/900/1900/2100 Display: 960 x 540 pixels, 4ins OS: Android 2.2 Camera: Five megapixels with flash rear-facing, 0.3 megapixels forward-facing GPS: A-GPS Processor: 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 Bluetooth: v2.1 + EDR Wi-Fi: 802.11 a/b/g/n Memory: 16GB internal Dimensions: 64 x 118 x 11 mm Weight: 134g Battery: Lithium Polymer 1930 mAh BENCHMARKS SunSpider (Phone): 4140.6ms SunSpider (Lapdock): 6146.1ms Battery life (audio, phone): 52h11m Battery life (H264, phone): 7h23m Battery life (H264, lapdock): 8h34m

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