Motorola launched Atrix 2 in India in March. It was announced for AT&T last October. It has 4.3-inch (960 x 540 pixels) display and is powered by 1 GHz dual-core processor. It still runs on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) with the update for Android 4.0 ICS expected any time soon.
Box Contents
- Motorola Atrix Phone
- 1785 mAh battery
- Ear phones
- Charger
- User Manual and Warranty card
Hardware
The 4.3-inch display is has Gorilla Glass protected and is glossy, but it is visible under sunlight. It is prone to fingerprints and there is a metal strip running around the sides of the phone. The earpiece is at the top, VGA camera on the right with Motorola branding next to that. Proximity and ambient light sensors and notification lights are at the right. Even though it is sleek at 10.4 mm thickness, it feels bulky due to its curved design and weighs 147 grams.
The capacitive touch buttons for menu, home, back and search are at the bottom below the display
There are USB and a micro HDMI ports on the right
The Volume rocker is at the left and a dedicated camera button below
There is a lock / power button at the top along with the 3.5mm audio jack at the center. There is a secondary microphone between them.
It has 8MP camera at the back with LED flash that can record 1080p HD videos.
Even though the back has some pattern, it is smooth and is slippery and is not comfortable to hold due to it’s curved design. There is a Motorola logo at the center and speaker grill at the bottom.
When you open the back cover, you can see the 1735 mAh battery. You need to remove the battery to insert the SIM card. The microSD card slot it at the top next to the camera.
Camera
The Phone has 8MP auto focus shooter with an LED flash. It does pretty good job but it’s hard to focus while taking some macro shots. You can use the flash in low lighting conditions, which is powerful. You can swipe the bottom to view the camera settings. The camera has wide screen mode that captures images at 6MP resolution to match the screen, you can switch it off to take the normal shots at 8MP resolution in 4:3 ratio.
There are different scenes such as Auto, portrait mode, Sport, Night portrait, Macro etc. and effects such as black and white, negative, sepia etc. You can also add geo tags and disable camera tone while capturing images. There are different modes such as single shot, panaroma, multi-shot and timer mode. You can switch to the front camera to capture images.
Here are some sample images for you to check out
The Video camera lets you record videos at 1080p HD resolution. There are different audio scenes such as Everyday (default), Outdoors and Concert which you can use while recording videos. Both the video and audio were pretty decent. You can also capture videos using the front camera at VGA resolution.
Here is the 1080p HD video sample
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmGYY5t18q0
Software
The Motorola Atrix 2 runs on Android Gingerbread 2.3. with MOTOBLUR UI. There are 5 homescreens with the center screen as default. You can add widgets, shortcuts and even folders on the different home screens and can set different wallpapers including live wallpapers.
You need to swipe right to unlock and can swipe left to toggle between silent / sound mode. The drop down notification bar shows notifications and your network. You can hold the home button to view the recent apps. When you press and hold the power button you get a menu that shows different modes such as silent, flight and sleep mode. The sleep mode makes your device go to sleep to wake up in seconds instead to powering it off completely.
The settings menu has different settings including setting for HDMI that lets you resize the image to be displayed on TV. You can also set up several accounts, that shows different icons.
There is a battery and data manager which lets you save battery using different options. You can set a particular time frame for it to switch data off completely if the phone is off for 15 minutes or a period of your choice.
There are several widgets such as Analog Clock, Bookmarks from browser, Calendar, News & Weather Social Networking, etc. The Social Status lets you post to different accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut and Twitter together. There are also separate toggle buttons widget for Mobile Data, Airplane Mode, Bluetooth, GPS, Power control and Wi-Fi.
Apps
There are the usual utility apps such as Calculator, Alarm, Dialer, Contacts, Calendar, Messaging etc. Other apps include, Go To Meeting by Citrix for web conferencing, Motoprint to print documents over WiFi, Google Maps for Navigation, Quick office document reader, Social networking that shows combined Facebook and Twitter updates, Tasks lets you manage to-do list. The Motocast lets you access music from PC on your phone via Motocast PC suit. There is also NFS Hot Pursuit game that comes for free through a software OTA update once you setup the device for the first time. You can always download apps from the Google Play.
Music Player, FM Radio and Video Player
The Music player can play MP3, WAV, AAC, WMA9, WMA10, MIDI, AMR and AAC formats. The Music player is quite different that shows different categories. My Music shows the music library that lists songs on different categories. The speaker is not loud, also since it is located at the back the sound gets muffled. You can also view lyrics if the song supports it but there is no equalizer. The bundled ear phones is not an in-ear one but sounds fine. There is FM Radio with RDS. It has auto tuning but you can’t listen via loud speaker.
There is a Music Videos section where you can add music videos manually or search on Youtube based on Artist or title. The TuneWiki community lets you find songs, charts, music maps and hot playlists that needs data. There is also a Song identification features that is powered by SoundHound. You can just play the song, and it just identifies them. The Video Player plays MPEG-4 and AVI formats in 1080p resolution but doesn’t support some formats like MKV and MPG.
The Gallery is displayed in timeline with preview in the landscape format.
Connectivity
The connectivity features include, 3G HSDA 21.1Mbps (Category 14) Hotspot to share it with up to 5 other WiFi-enabled devices, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR with A2DP, Wi-Fi 802.11 b,g, n with DLNA and GPS / aGPS.
Unlike the Razr the data manager doesn’t show the data used, but there is data saver that restricts heavy usage in some apps like browser (queues downloads), email (postpones attachment), Market (queues downloads) till the device is connected to a WiFi network. There is a There is mini HDMI out so that you can connect your phone to a TV.
Calls, Messaging, Browser and Keyboard
The voice calls were clear without any drop calls. The dialer shows recently called or received number at the top and there is speed dial function. The messaging includes text messaging in thread view and multiple selection.
The browser scored 189 points in the html5 test and offers default functions such as remember password, set search engine etc. It has Flash support. There is the default Motorola keyboard with auto correction and word prediction along with Swype.
Benchmarks
Here are some benchmarks to test the performance.
Quadrant and AnTuTu
SmartBench2012 and Vellamo
Conclusion
This is a pretty good phones with good specs with good performance, especially in gaming and video recording. The 1785 mAh battery is pretty good which last though out the day with an hour of browsing via 3G, few calls, messaging and 2 to 3 hours of music and images. At an affordable price point of around 22,000 with Android 4.0 update expected really soon, this is a definitely a good phone.
Pros
- Performance is good
- Good battery life
Cons
- Bulky
- Runs on older version of Android