Motorola Lapdock for Motorola Atrix Review

The Motorola LapDock for Motorola Atrix was one of the most innovative technologies announced at CES this year.  It represented the ultimate ability, to have both your phone and your computer to be one and the same.  (Read our reviews for the Motorola Atrix 4g here and here.)  At this point I can add my impressions of WebTop and the LapDock.  In general they were quite positive.

Hardware

Upon looking at the exterior of the device you realize there is very little there. All you have is the Motorola logo, the charge port, two usb ports and speaker grilles.  Upon opening the device you are greeted by an 11.6" screen, an amply sized trackpad, and a decent keyboard.  With my abnormally large hands I can find it difficult to type on the keyboard, but all in all the experience isn't horrible.  Well typing I have found I tend to activate the trackpad, but because the trackpad can be locked this is a fairly minor issue.  The trackpad is plenty large and you can double tap the upper left hand corner to lock it.  The screen is fairly well sized and with decent viewing angles, decent colors and good contrast.  The hardware is impressively good.  The battery life seems to be accurate to what Motorola has claimed, which is in the range of 8 hours.  Motorola is quite well known for their hardware. 

Build Quality

The build quality is quite impressive.   It's all manufactured out of some kind of metal, probably aluminum and has a very solid feel.  The device has a comfortable density and heft, but without being heavy.  This seems like a device that could take a lickin' and keep on tickin'.

Keyboard

The keyboard is always a problem in a device like this.  You are naturally constrained by the size of the device so the keyboard is where you need to compromise.  Motorola went with a chiclet style keyboard, which many prefer in a device such as this.  I personally prefer the keys to be as large as possible, on account of my freakish hands.  Overall the typing experience is not bad with the keys having a good feel and nice click.  No where near as mushy as some devices.

Software

The WebTop software is is truly revolutionary.  It changes the phone-computer paradigm in a radical way.  It changes your mobile device into your computing device, leaving your life with a new degree of interconnectivity.  When you dock your phone, you are greeted with an emulated view of your phone with full functionality.  You can use this phone as you would any other.  There are no constraints and only very little lag well you interact with it.  It's interesting playing Angry Birds on a screen this large, without touch.  But you must remember, there are no multi-touch gestures, no pinch-to-zoom etc...  This makes certain apps more difficult to use.  But still not impossible.

The Firefox web browser is just what you expect from a browser.  But when you have several tabs open you can see a little bit of lag.  When you are using Google Docs and really hammering away at the keys you can see a delay in the typing.  You are running this on a dual core 1 ghz machine with 1 gb of ram.  While these are great specs for a phone, they are weak for a computer and that can show through in the web browsing experience.  But being able to use a full web browser with add-ons is quite impressive, and an interesting experience.

There is support for both external keyboards and mice and both work quite well with all of the device.  You can also network with printers, but be forewarned you can only print on printers with PostScript.  The device also accepts USB storage devices and can copy and move data from them to your device. 

Closing Remarks

I used the device to type this entire review, albeit with an external keyboard.  This proves to me the device has a real use and can be used for content creation.  The potential for this device is incredible and I see it advancing a lot into the future.  The concepts behind the device are very forward thinking and resonate with concepts of convergence and therefore are quite enticing.  The device has a few weaker areas, but I in no way regret my purchase and will continue to use and appreciate it.  This is the future of computing.

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--Bennett  contact me at bnetter12@gmail.com