dropSKIP…

Got our new Motorola Atrix in today, including the Webtop laptop chassis and the Entertainment Center / Webtop Access Kit. Spent a few hours with it, basic setup, watched part of a Fringe episode on the included ATT U-verse app which on playback was powered by HULU.

I haven’t un-boxed the Entertainment Center but I was able to do the basic setup on the phone and dock it in the Webtop laptop like chassis.

First impressions:

The phone is very nice, similar dimensions to the iPhone4. My buddy Vincent at the local ATT Store enabled 4G and put me on the beta 4G plan since it’s not officially available here yet. It is definitely faster then 3G and I am looking forward to being back in the Bay Area next week to really test the speed. I was a little frustrated with not having unlimited data. 5GB fine print; – 5GB is what I mean by unlimited in this case, since Unlimited-unlimited is no longer with us, Unlimited aka 5GB was almost as easy to have and forget about data usage concern, 2GB adds some more management stress back to my daily life, the same as taking your phone to a foreign country, I shouldn’t feel like this. yea, I am whining!

The plan gives me 2GB for the Phone and 2GB for the tethering / Webtop usage. (I have not tested 4G Hotspot capability yet) it easily connected to the home WiFi (Airport Extreme  w/ a few Airport Express units extending the range)

I added a 32GB MicroSD card (48GB on-board total with the card), started the phone, followed the quick on-screen setup, created a Moto BLUR account and the phone finished it’s ATT initialized one-time setup. I made a call to my trusty iPhone4 and it was about that simple. I noticed the Atrix has a bio-metric fingerprint scanner, I will set that up and test it out soon and report back. (very cool if it works perfectly, because it has to)

As soon as I docked the phone in the Webtop chassis, it came alive, the battery started charging as well is it launched the included Firefox web browser and went right to Moto’s website and the Flash demo of the Atrix started to run without a hitch. (What’s up with the Xoom not being able to play it’s own Flash demo? Flash is on the Atrix out of the box), Yea, I know, its only Android 2.2.1 and not 3.0 / Honeycomb.

The Webtop view is pretty slick, it has a Mobile View which shows what would be on the phone (if the screen were on) and you also have the larger desktop with a toolbar at the bottom center similar to Mac OS/X. Although the phone comes with quite a few pre-loaded apps (some cool, some crappy, you pick!) the Webtop was quite clean with 10 icons showing the main/basic stuff everyone uses plus Facebook, ATT U-verse, Firefox.

Atrix+Webtop photo

It is a little odd to me to have a phone hanging sideways off the back of the Webtop (Laptop like docking station) but surprisingly, using it on my lap didn’t really cause that big of an issue. I am concerned that I might hit it and torque the microUSB and HDMI adapters from the docking station or worse, bust the phone itself at the connectors. How would I charge it then? Time will tell.

Atrix hanging off back of Webtop

Something that also surprised me was when I used the flash on my iPhone4 to take this picture I noticed a ghost image on the Atrix Phone, when docked the backlight is OFF, but the flash picked up the screen image, you can’t see the time without strong direct light, maybe there is a toggle to turn on the screen to double as a clock when docked and the Webtop is open. If you close the screen on the Webtop, the phone backlight comes on and you are presented with two options: Widget Clock or Do Nothing (which keeps the current phone app on screen with the backlight on, the clock is different between backlight the ghost image and the backlit clock, not sure why they would display anything without the backlight by default) You can also toggle to remember which choice you picked for next time and it won’t ask again. I am not sure how useful it is but I guess if you had it on the night stand or desk it would be used, it does have a few weather bits to like temperature and an icon representation of clouds, etc.

Some things I am really interested in digging further into are; the phone is charged but the Webtop is still charging, how long does the battery in the Webtop last? How long does it take to charge from empty? And of course how well does it work day to day over the long haul and in the real-world. Stay tuned, we will answer all of this as the Atrix is going to replace my Macbook Pro for a while!