Introduced earlier this year, the original Motorola Atrix was praised for its dual-core processor, impressive graphics performance and more importantly, its ability to turn into a full-blown Linux computer. Seven months later, here comes the Motorola Atrix 2, an improved version of the same original concept, but with newer hardware, display, and updated software.
How big of a difference is there between Atrix and Atrix 2, and most importantly, is this an Android smartphone for you? In this review, I’ll go over “killer apps” like email, Facebook, Skype, the camera capabilities and other critical aspects of the phone. Are you ready? Let’s take a look. Context
We all use our smartphones differently, that’s why I tell you what I do with them: I check my email (Microsoft Exchange), and I reply very moderately because virtual keyboards are slow to type with. I browse the web several times a day to check on news and stocks (mainly on mobile sites), but I rarely watch movies or play music. I don’t call much – maybe 10mn a day, if at all. On the “apps” side, I use a couple of social networks, and I rarely play games on the go. In the evenings, I may use my phone as a TV remote from time to time. This usage pattern will affect battery life and the perception of what features are useful.
The Motorola Atrix 2 is a cleanly designed phone that has been built with the original Atrix spirit in mind. The new design keeps a 4” LCD display, but fortunately, one that does not use a PenTile sub-pixel grid like the Motorola Photon 4G. The screen’s image is clear and does not exhibit the moire effect from the Photon and other Motorola phones.
The display is better than the one on the Photon 4G and Droid 3
The display uses the same qHD resolution that is now common in the Android world. You can set it up to be really bright if you need to. In terms of contrast, this won’t beat an OLED display which has naturally excellent contrast. In terms of color quality, this is close to IPS displays used in LG and Apple phones (4, 4S) – but IPS gets better view angle, which is not a problem at all for a phone as we look at it straight on. In conclusion, this is a good display – just not the best out there.
Just below the screen, you can find the Android hardware buttons. They are backlit, so you can see them in the dark, but the light goes off to save on battery life, which makes then invisible. the backlight is controlled by the light sensor located at the top of the phone, near the earpiece, and it can take a few seconds for it to realize that the backight is needed. It would be great if Motorola could make it so the buttons are visible at all times
The Atrix 2 fits well in my hand, and it feels good. I wish that the Power button did protrude more than it does. It is a bit hard to “feel” it, and this is clearly a button that I use dozens of times a day. I hope that Motorola will take that into account for future designs. The volume buttons are better, although they too could be a bit more tactile.
At the top, you will find the usual 3.5mm audio jack connector, and on the lower left side, the USB port and the micro-HDMI connectors can be found. I suspect that this location has been chosen to accomodate the Motorola docks and it is great for that. However, a simple USB cable gets in the way if you want to use the phone and charge/sync it at the same time.
The back cover is made of textured plastic which has a bit of a leathery feel. Interestingly enough the Samsung Galaxy S2, which also has a plastic back cover feels much more plastic than the Motorola design. The cover is very easy to remove if you need to access the battery or the microSD port.
Call quality (average) : The sound quality during voice calls is normal and quite average when compared to most phones that I’ve tried recently, there’s nothing to report on that front. I wished that there was a good benchmark for sound quality, but there’s not. So, in my humble perception, this phone is neither worse, or better, than most phones that I had in my hands for the past 6 months.
Dialing / contacts : dialing a number, or finding a contact is very easy. You can use the virtual numeric pad of course, or head into the contact list and scroll down or type a name. If you have a lot of contacts, creating a list of favorites may help quite a bit. My personal favorite on Android is the “direct dial” shortcut. Basically, you choose a contact and a number, and you create an icon on the home page. Upon pressing it, the call is directly placed. It’s the fastest way to call someone, and I use it all the time.
This Motorola phone also has a “Contact quick task” widgets that lets you select up to two actions (call, email, sms…) for any given contact.The idea is quite good, and i like it, but the actual widget takes too much surface on the home screen (4 icons worth). That’s because the widget features the photo of your contact. I believe that it could have been twice as small if it had used only the name.
Web browsing : the Android web browser does a very good job at rendering pages from “desktop-sized” websites, and of course from mobile sites as well. The dual-core processor should make web browsing a bit faster because this activity can use quite a number of processes that can be split across multiple cores. That said, this remains a mobile phone, so sites like Google Docs and other very interactive services tend to be significantly slower when compared to a computer.
Flash Support : Not surprisingly, Flash is well supported as well (version 11 is preloaded). This means that you have access to a world of small business and other websites that have been built with Flash. If you have never used an Android smartphone before, I need to set your expectations properly: when compared to a computer, Flash is still slow in absolute terms. Keep in mind that most Flash content has been designed for much more powerful computers, so although “it runs”, the user experience is often not as good as one might expect.
Zumocast : Motorola, is one of the companies that really like adding software to its phones, and ZumoCast is the latest feature that Motorola has embedded in the Atrix 2. Motorola calls Zumocast your Personal Cloud, which lets you stream music, videos and share files to your Motorola phone.
It works by having a ZumoCast client run on one or more computers (PC or Mac), and from there, ZumoCast can communicate to your Atrix 2 and let you do all the things above. Because the service communicates to zumocast.com, there is no need to setup your network, it just works. Zumocast also lets you access files from a web browser if you need to. This is an interesting addition because out of the box Android doesn’t let you do anything like this.
MotoBlur is a Motorola web service that aggregates updates from a number of social networks on Motorola’s servers. This allows the Motorola phone to pull updates from all social networks at once, instead of pulling information from each of them separately. This may save battery life, and it also allows the phone to display social network updates in a consolidated way. [ MotoBlur page ]
Webtop is Motorola’s desktop environment that turns on as soon as you connect this smartphone to a TV/monitor via HDMI. Yes, you read that right, this phone can turn into computer complete with a desktop version of Firefox (I talked about Webtop more extensively in my Motorola Atrix Review , but I basically think that it is a bit too slow for my taste). If you are using a Dock, you can even plug in a regular mouse and keyboard, which is critical to get any kind of serious work done. Google docs, webmail and other productivity sites should just work.
Obviously, this is still a smartphone, and things aren’t fast, but keep in mind that the device fits in your pockets. How you enjoy this depends on what you do. I find it OK to do emails and other text-based applications, but I would not leave my laptop home on a business trip. I love the idea, and Motorola has done a good job of pulling this off, but the concept needs more muscle to back it up.
Motorola Media Link : Out of the box, Android doesn’t really have much when it comes to synchronizing the files between your computer and your smartphone. Media Link is a utility (for Windows) that synchronizes media files and contacts from a computer to the phone. Music files can be synchronized from iTunes or Windows Media Player, while photos and video are simply synchronized from a directory. Contacts can come from Outlook or Windows Mail. [ Media link homepage ]
Virtual keyboard : the stock Android keyboard cover the bases and is pretty solid. In general the most important thing on a such a keyboard is the response time, which means the lag time between a key press and a response from the phone. There is always a lag time, but the smaller it is and the more “natural” you will find it to be. That’s because when we have tactile interaction with real objects, they react right away (push something, it moves).
To make the keyboard faster, I often disable the word suggestions and other optional features in the settings. You will have to experiment, but keep that in mind. The contrast between the keys and the background could be a little higher too, but I can live with it.
Swype keyboard : Swype is a much better, keyboard option. It has fortunately been pre-loaded on this phone. If you’ve never heard about Swype, it looks and can work as a regular virtual keyboard, but its real power is revealed when you slide your finger from one letter to the next to form words.
It’s very powerful because your finger doesn’t leave the surface of the screen, making the whole motion much more accurate than “tapping” on the screen. I generally find myself typing faster with swype, and even when I don’t use the sliding motion, the keyboard’s response time is noticeably better than the default virtual keyboard.
The weakness of Swype is that it relies a lot on a dictionary to get it right, so when I was trying to type “activesync”, it thought that I meant “quebec”… Swype is great for conversations, but eventually, you may have to fall back to “taps” for slang or technical keywords.
Email (excellent) : Most Android phones have very decent support for email, including personal email like Yahoo, Hotmail and others, but also professional email systems like Exchange . The latter is what I’m using on a daily basis at Ubergizmo and overall, I think that Motorola nailed the email support.
First, when you open your email app, the latest emails are there and you don’t have to wait for the email app to download them. You may not realize it, but the iPhone 4/4S and the Galaxy S2 both download email when you open/go back to the Mail app. I’m not sure if that saves actual battery life, but this is pretty annoying when you’re checking email often.
Facebook : I use the Facebook app like most of you, but with Motorola phones, I tend to use their social networks app to keep track of my friends updates. Why? Because Motorola’s servers do most of the pulling job, and send me a big chunk of data when I needed. That’s a little faster and probably more battery-efficient than having a bunch of apps from different networks. I can like or comment Facebook updates from their app, but if I want to upload a photo, I would run the actual Facebook app.
Google Maps (excellent) : As of late, I found the mapping experience to be much better on Android devices, and that certainly has to do with the fact that Google has been improving its mapping application on its own platform, while leaving other mobile OSes in the cold. It’s not a bad tactic to gain an edge, and the net result is that Android users have been getting steady improvements, while others have mostly stagnated.
First, Android users get free turn-by-turn navigation. This is a big deal as this feature can cost quite a bit of money on other platforms. Secondly, new features like “download map area” are introduced on a regular basis. This one is supposed to let you preload an area the size of a city, this is really cool. Here’s how to enable it:
1/ in Google Map, do Menu>More>Labs>enable pre-cache map area
2/ go to the map, select a place, expand the place’s options and choose “pre-chace map area”
In my case, Google Maps has pre-cached the whole city of San Francisco, and it is going to boost Google Map’s speed.
Skype (video chat unavailable, for now) : Skype works well for chat and audio calls, but for some reason, the webcams did not work. I tried both in high quality or low quality, and they stayed black despite all my efforts. The problem has also been reported by other Skype for Android users . No other news site has reported the problem yet, but I’ve tried with more than one Atrix 2, and I’m sure that this will need fixing by Motorola. Hopefully, Motorola is already working on it.
First of all, I would like to mention that I have taken an uploaded many (full-size) photos with the Atrix 2, and also with the Galaxy S2 (T-mobile) and the iPhone 4S for comparison. They are on our Ubergizmo Flickr account .
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