Hands-on photos of Motorola’s Atrix/Droid Bionic 4G smartphone and dock

January 7, 2011 By Greg Mombert

Check out photos of Motorola’s Atrix/Droid Bionic 4G smartphone and dock.

We got a chance to check out Motorola’s exciting new Atrix/Droid Bionic 4G smartphone at CES. The Atrix is one of the most powerful smartphones to hit the US market with a dual core 2 GHz processor capable of browsing the web at twice the speed of most competitors. Motorola’s webtop application allows a full Firefox 3.6 browser to be run with support for Adobe Flash. Possibly even more impressive than the phone is the corresponding Laptop Dock that turns the phone into an 11.6-inch laptop with full keyboard, speakers and three-cell battery. The phone is simply docked into the back of the device and all the phones apps can be enjoyed on the much larger screen. There are subtle hardware differences between the Atrix and the Bionic and with the Atrix being available on AT&T and the Bionic being available on Verizon.

Showing 16 comments

Tom Pajak at 2:26am 2nd March 2011 Too bad Motorola is KILLING the dock before it even comes out...$500 for just a battery powered screen??.....sorry Motorola you better do ALOT better than this
LoveIt at 9:18am 8th January 2011 Thats correct Tenacious Bee. The "Laptop Dock" is simply a screen, keyboard, and battery. I believe I have read under normal use the battery lasts 8 hours per charge. This is on top of the Motorola Atrix getting charged while docked. The Atrix is required to dock with the laptop because it holds the processor,wifi, 4g antennas, memory, harddrive, motherboard...well you get the point. The Motorola Atrix is the computer. I love the video on the Motorola website that shows the true usability of this tool. In the video, the user is talking on the phone via a bluetooth headset while it is docked in the laptop. Without breaking conversation, the user closes the laptop screen and takes the Atrix out of the dock. The user then proceeds to move over to a window, take a picture of something...still chatting via bluetooth, and then email it to the person the user is talking too. That is TRUE multi-tasking. Absolutely Incredible!!!
tenacious bee at 8:04am 8th January 2011 Good post Zander. I am not sure everyone understands what they are looking at. The "laptop" is a dock for the phone. It allows one to use the phone with a larger screen and keyboard. It will not tun the phone into a windows laptop nor will the dock cost anywhere near what a laptop would be priced at. This thing is full of win. It makes owning a ipad or android tablet pointless if you own this phone.
chuck at 12:02am 8th January 2011 Probably because that would render the laptop unusable without the phone unless one has a 3rd peice of hardware ie a pointing device aka mouse.
1. Zander at 12:28am 8th January 2011 The phone IS the laptop, so the laptop would be unusable without the phone. :P
wow at 10:30pm 7th January 2011 Why didn't they dock the phone into the mouse trackpad area and double as a trackpad??? that way nothing sticking out in the back........
Lucas at 5:16pm 7th January 2011 This is the Droid Bionic.
1. ioman at 8:36pm 7th January 2011 Essentially the same phone, Atrix is on AT&T and the Droid Bionic is on Verizon.
  1. Lucas at 11:30pm 7th January 2011 The Droid is 4.3" and the Atrix is 4", plus they have different UIs. So they aren't the exact same phone. The phone pictured is the Droid, and that is all my point was. They were calling it the Atrix in this article, but I see they have updated that now.
    ioman at 3:24am 8th January 2011 Ya, looks like they updated it. Small details seperate them, but still basically the same phone.
    thiskid. at 3:08pm 8th January 2011 actually, the droid bionic has half the ram as the Atrix, thats why the Atrix can run the laptop UI
    Robert Brian Medley at 2:09pm 10th January 2011 I am hearing the Bionic has 512Mb of DDR2 where the Atrix is equipped with 1Gb standard DDR. So the phones memory wise would operate almost exactly the same.
RIch at 4:48pm 7th January 2011 I thought the Atrix was coming out for ATT..
12Red34 at 4:28pm 7th January 2011 Looks good. I want 1 ! ! The laptop feature is nice if you have a Motorola laptop! Buying a laptop just for the purpose of docking the phone would be a little grand. When is it out? More importantly, when is it out in Canada?!
1. nick at 4:45pm 7th January 2011 The laptop is only a dock. It is just a battery, keyboard, and screen.
2. gsdev at 1:51pm 17th January 2011 The laptop dock isnt a laptop. It is a dock that turns the phone into a laptop.