I took a closer look at the Motorola Atrix on display here at Mobile World Congress. This is a smartphone built on NVidia’s Tegra 2 dual-core chipset. I’m interested in the concept as much as the device. Instead of carrying a laptop and a smartphone, you use the smartphone alone when out and about, or dock to a laptop-like screen and keyboard when at a desk. The dock has its own 36Wh battery so you are not tied to mains power.
The Atrix has a few extra tricks as well. HDMI out enables HD video. An audio dock converts it to a decent portable music player.
The smartphone also morphs into a controller if you use Motorola’s alternative dock, designed for fully external keyboard and screen.
It is a compelling concept, though there is a little awkwardness in the way Motorola has implemented it. The Atrix has two graphical shells installed. One is Android. The other is a an alternative Linux shell which Motorola calls Webtop. While you can freely download apps to Android, the Webtop has just a few applications pre-installed by Motorola, and with no official way to add further applications. One of them is Firefox, so you can browse the web using a full-size browser.
The disconnect between Android and Webtop is mitigated by the ability to run Android within Webtop, either in its own smartphone-sized window, or full screen.
Personally I prefer the idea of running Android full screen, even though it is not designed for a laptop-sized screen, as I do not like the idea of having two separate sets of apps. That seems to miss the point of having a single device. On the other hand, Webtop does enable non-Android apps to run on Atrix, so I can see the value it adds.
Leaving that aside, I do think this is a great idea and one that I expect to become important. After all, if you do not think Tegra 2 is quite powerful enough, you could wait for some future version built on the quad-core Tegra 3 (name not yet confirmed), which NVidia says is five times faster, and which may turn up in Smartphones late in 2011.
I had this idea a while back (not that it was particularly revolutionary as to be worth patenting!), so it’s interesting to see it come to fruition. There must be more of these coming out in future as small devices become more powerful. With data in the cloud the issue of having multiple devices is less of a problem, but there’s an attractive cost proposition where your one gadget is both your phone and your desktop computer (and music player etc.).