Hands-on: Motorola Atrix’s Ubuntu-powered WebTop experience

[Chevaliers]

Motorola's Atrix 4G smartphone was one of the most promising products unveiled at CES earlier this year. The innovative handset can plug into a netbook shell accessory, offering a desktop-like computing experience. The netbook shell contains no processor, memory, network hardware, or internal storage—it relies entirely on the docked phone to provide those essentials.
Motorola envisions a future in which smartphones are at the heart of the connected lifestyle, adapting and integrating with peripherals to meet the user's computing needs. The Atrix is a significant first step in that direction. Although the underlying concept is extremely intriguing, the implementation still leaves a lot to be desired. - GadgetsRepublic

 

[T4rd]

I thought this thread was supposed to be about your personal experience with it. I've already read what all the journalists had to say about it .

 

[NICKSTAR]

I don't get the point of this thread

 

[Evosunny]

I havent got to play with one yet, but our ATT rep at work said hed bring one by when he could so we could check it out. Im deff interested in seeing how it turns out first hand.

 

[IronChef75]

I'm sure I heard somewhere that the netbook 'shell' actually had it's own CPU and a custom Linux environment, and that it was dependent on the phone for storage and connectivity only.

It looked more like an almost complete Linux netbook that was artifically restricted for the sake of being dependent on the phone. It gives the appearance of what the future may hold by cheating, but it's probably a good first step, unless I'm completely misinformed.

 

[T4rd]

unless I'm completely misinformed.

That you are. The ONLY thing the webtop is comprised of is the LCD, keyboard, bezel and it has a big battery on-board to keep the phone charged while you're using it. There was a complete tear-down of it on Engadget that showed you all this too. It's a dual-core phone with 1 GB RAM, so why would it be hard to believe that it can run the Ubuntu/linux environment by itself?

 

[Uncle Humjaba]

I have an Atrix, and I can attest to the fact that it is quite awesome. Rooted, you can get the webtop environment on any HDMI display. Pretty sweet.