Motorola's ATRIX 4G: Tegra 2 Smartphone & Netbook in One
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 5, 2011 12:19 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- AT&T
- Motorola Droid
- CES 2011
- ATRIX 4G
- Mobile
Motorola just announced its flagship Tegra 2 based smartphone: the ATRIX 4G. Running Android 2.2, the ATRIX 4G has a pair of Cortex A9s running at 1GHz inside NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC (similar to the LG Optimus 2X that was just announced earlier today). The SoC has 1GB of memory on package, putting it at twice what you get in most high end smartphones today. The phone is 10.9mm thick and will ship with 16GB of internal NAND storage and a beefy 1930mAh battery.
The real killer feature for the ATRIX is Motorola's webtop application. Motorola will be offering a netbook chassis with a ATRIX 4G dock on it. When your phone is docked, the ATRIX 4G will drive the netbook's 11.6" display and use its 36Whr battery. You get a full keyboard in the 13.9mm thick chassis.
When docked the ATRIX 4G will give you up to 8 hours of battery life (seems a little low given the huge battery). Finally, when docked you'll browse the web using a full blown ARM compiled version of Firefox.
You're looking at the smartphone's first steps into the realm of the PC.
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Holler - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
would love a windows 7 phone version.LostPassword - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
unlocked? Gsm?bjacobson - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Open 20 tabs, it can't use more than 1 core. Why in the world would I want this on a phone? The android Firefox's use at least 3x the RAM as the other browsers, too.I'll stick with Opera 11 or Chrome, thanks. Chrome at least scales to all available cores, whereas Opera's UI events are prioritized or something and as a result it doesn't need to.
extide - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Sooo how many tabs are you looking at at once? Also (I know on PC FF 4.0 has a separate process that all the plugins run in, so flash/etc is run on another core)bjacobson - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Any browser worth its salt knows to render the tab you're looking at currently, first.Sorry, Firefox isn't included.
ATOmega - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
I have to admit, making a phone that just plugs into a larger enclosure is a pretty nifty way to get best of both worlds. There's definitely some inspired design going on here.Although it does further drive home the reality that the larger tablets are ridiculously overpriced. If they can pack Tegra2 into a small package for one price, putting it in a larger package shouldn't net the same or greater cost. While you are getting a larger screen, it's totally disingenuous to think that on it's own makes up for the difference.
DanNeely - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Unsubsidized top tier smart phones are almost as expensive as good tablets, in both cases a large chunk of the sticker price goes to engineering costs for the hardware/software design; not the manufacturing cost. Until tablet sales volumes begin to approach those of smartphones the engineering cost/unit will be significantly higher.codedivine - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Is Tegra 2 confirmed? Might it not be some other dual-core SoC?zorxd - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
I bet that laptop dock will be as expensive as a netbook, so it will be uselessTareX - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
I would seriously doubt that. It will be half as expensive, at least. It's a netbook sans internals.... I don't know how netbooks are priced, but I'd think the internals account for at least half the price.