The New Motorola Atrix 2 4G Unleashed!
Hot off the release of the original Motorola Atrix earlier this year in February 2011, we now have its sequel the Motorola Atrix 2 4G newly released in October 2011. In a year that has witnessed many groundbreaking releases from the Android platform, featuring many top-end Gingerbread smartphones and Honeycomb tablets from Samsung, HTC, and Motorola, let us now check out this sequel to the Motorola Atrix, to see how much has improved.
As expected, the new Motorola Atrix 2 4G would look at least quite a bit like its predecessor to be recognizable, though the touchscreen has grown an additional 0.3 inches to the now popular size of 4.3 inches sported by its main competitors Samsung Galaxy S II and HTC Sensation. It’s really hard to say which size you would prefer, since 4.3 inches does give you a more readable display at the expense of being wider and bulkier. Still, this was compensated by its 10mm thickness, which is almost 1mm thinner than the original. This seems to be the trend of touchscreen smartphones these days, evolving to be like their larger cousin the tablet computers, growing thinner with larger screens. Gripping the Motorola Atrix 2 4G was comfortable thanks to its textured back cover and curved sides.
Now when we powered on the Motorola Atrix 2, we found the screen resolution unchanged at the same qHD 960 x 540 resolution of the original. Still the display looked better despite theoretically having a slightly ‘lower’ image quality since the same number of pixels are now fitted into a larger 4.3-inch screen. Motorola has now ditched the Pentile matrix of the original Atrix and Droid Bionic, which seems to result in a better display when under direct sunlight outdoors. Just below the touchscreen are the standard 4 touchscreen buttons: menu, home, back and search, with the front-facing VGA camera for video calls. On the right, we have the volume buttons and a new physical camera button. On the top, similar to the iPhone, we have the power/screen lock button and the 3.5mm headphone jack.
Moving on to the more outstanding new features in the Motorola Atrix 2 4G, the main rear-facing camera has been beefed up to 8-megapixels with 1080p Full HD video capability. Motorola is indeed keeping up the pace here, since this spec is now sported by its biggest rivals Samsung and Apple too. With 8GB of internal memory expandable via microSD, you are looking at about 40GB maximum flash storage with a 32GB microSD card at this point. With access to the 4G network under AT&T, download speeds have now been beefed up to HSPA + 21Mbps over the previous 14.4Mbps. The dual-core processor remains at 1GHz speed, though changed from Tegra 2 to the TI OMAP4430. It sure looks like Motorola wasn’t trying to break the speed barrier here with the 1.2GHz-1.5GHz dual core speeds now presently available, probably while trying to preserve a competitive midrange price point in the high-end smartphone category.
Where Motorola sets itself apart from the competition in its Atrix 2, similar to the original, is in its unique accessories like Webtop, LapDock and HD Station. With its proprietary Webtop application, the Atrix 2 can be connected to an external monitor for access to a full desktop-sized Firefox HTML browser, with a new version 5.0 over the previous 4.0. With the ZumoCast app, you will have remote access and streaming to all your music, photos and videos with your PC’s hard drive. Hence its name, the LapDock essentially transforms the Atrix 2 4G into a ‘laptop’ once plugged in. Featuring a full-sized laptop keyboard and a 10.1-inch display on the LapDock 100 model, there is even a larger 14-inch screen on the LapDock 500. These are certainly unique hybrid features where Motorola allows its Atrix 2 to ‘transform’ into a full-sized laptop when needed.
The overall specs of the Motorola Atrix 2 4G are made complete with wireless N Wi-Fi connectivity (802.11b/g/n), Mobile Hotspot that allows tethering of your data connection to other Wi-Fi enabled devices, Bluetooth 2.1, MicroUSB, and a HDMI port as well to output full HD 1080p video via the optional HDMI cable. Despite having a slightly smaller capacity 1785 mAh lithium-ion battery than the original 1,930 mAh, battery life was noticeably better, providing up to 8.5 hours talk time, 15.9 days standby time, and just over 5 hours in watching videos, about an hour longer than the original.
To summarize, the Motorola Atrix 2 4G is an improved model of the original with some enhanced specs to keep it up to date, somewhat akin to Apple’s iPhone 4S over the iPhone 4. While not absolutely earth-shattering, this is a hard phone to beat at its sub-$50 price point (under contract), which certainly keeps Motorola running up to speed as the race for smartphone supremacy rages on.
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