Tag Archives: phone

Atrix 4G Phone

Can the Atrix 4G really become your next PC?

You know that advertisement where you see the guy trying to explain to airport security if his phone is a computer or a phone or both? Visit the above link to read a review of it. Seems kind of like a cool idea until you learn some of the details: Turns out you’re not actually running the computer from your phone. The computer portion is running its own version of Linux. A quote from a Slashdot article, Can the Atrix 4G Really Become Your Next PC?, explains it the best:

So I was reading the article and thinking “$400 for the laptop module? $200 + peripherals for the dock? Those are the equivalent of a cheap laptop/PC” Then I got to this tidbit:

“When you dock the Atrix, the Firefox browser and other dock-provided services aren’t running from the Atrix but instead from a stripped-down Linux PC inside the dock. A real post-PC device would run everything from the smartphone or tablet, and it would use the dock to add more processing or take advantage of peripherals.”

What? Why the heck am I buying this thing? All you’re selling is an ultra-underpowered, crippled Linux computer that only works when a weird phone is plugged in for no particular reason. Syncing open tabs in FireFox is nice, but that’s not enough. A simple app could do that. At home, I can keep a computer no problem. On the go, I still have to keep your laptop dock thing, so no space savings there.

Then there are other downsides. I’m guessing it drains the battery faster to use the laptop dock thing. The pictures of the laptop dock make it look really easy to snap the phone off the back accidentally and break the phone/dock. It’s nice to know the reviewer doesn’t think the thing feels secure in the dock.

This seems to be where computers will go for most people, but this first implementation clearly sounds more like a beta product than a first generation.