In a Consumer Electronics Show that seemed dominated by mobile news, and Motorola news in particular, one product stood out as the most compelling to most people. Of all things, it was a Motorola Android phone on AT&T, and it stands as the first product in a possible future for converged devices. I'm talking about the Motorola Atrix, first demonstrated by AT&T at its CES presentation on Wednesday. The phone itself is a beast with a Tegra 2 dual-core processor, 1 GB of DDR 2 RAM, a 4-inch QHD (960 x 540) display, a front-facing camera, and 1930 mAh battery. It's also an HSPA+ phone on AT&T, which they are calling 4G, making the full name of the phone the Motorola Atrix 4G. Taken alone, that would be enough of a reason to consider the phone, but it is most decidedly not the specs that make this a compelling device. No, what makes this device the one that stole people's attention at CES is the ecosystem that Motorola is crafting that places the smartphone at the center of a user's computing world.
The Atrix is not just a phone but the first phone with compelling accessories that actually add value to the device. When Motorola introduced the phone, it also announced a few docks and explained how they worked. The HD Multimedia Dock serves to connect the phone to a larger screen or monitor, but attach a keyboard and mouse to the dock and the experience changes dramatically. The same changes take effect if you dock the phone in the well-made Laptop Dock (pictured above). The Laptop Dock is incredibly thin and sets the phone on the back behind the screen. The build quality of the dock has been praised by everyone as more than adequate for a product of this nature.
Again, it isn't the actual hardware that matters here. The real magic is in how you use the phone when it's docked. When docked, the phone still drives everything, but the UI changes into what can only be described as a stripped down Linux desktop. URLs in the phone browser get pushed out as open windows in Firefox. A phone emulator appears on the screen and various applications are accessible either through a custom dock on the bottom of the screen or through the emulator itself. The idea is that while you have your phone docked, you can do everything you would normally be able to do with your phone, including access your email and even reply to text messages. You can watch Engadget's Josh Topolsky demonstrate the different docks and uses here.
This is a huge play by Motorola that makes real the concept of having on device that can handle any task. One issue as smartphones become more prevalent is that your phone has all these applications and content, but when you sit down at your computer there isn't an easy way to resume where you left off. If the phone is small enough to be with you at all times, but powerful enough to do these types of tasks, why not make it the central part of your computing experience? Why not build an entire ecosystem around the phone? Considering that this can work with any monitor and keyboard, or any shell of a laptop with the right connections, we could be looking at a new competitor to the laptop. Why bother with a netbook if this can do all of the same tasks but in a way that works seamlessly with the phone that you always carry around?
What Motorola is doing here to switch between Android and a webtop Linux client is seriously impressive software work. They are stripping apart the various pieces of Android and projecting them on a screen in a way that is far more familiar to desktop users. In the phone emulation window, they are even reintroducing the mouse and pointer to manipulate the phone instead of the finger. The most impressive part of it all, though, is how seamlessly it appears to work moving between desktop dock to phone to laptop dock. It just knows what to do and progress doesn't appear to be interrupted.
So while it is impressive, what will ultimately matter for this phone is execution and price. The following are questions, the answers to which could end up sinking a great idea:
1. Can you actually move between devices as smoothly as we've seen so far? If you have certain apps running, how will they translate to the next environment and will they result in force quits? Android has enough freezing and force close issues already without adding more complexity to the mix.
2. Will there be any disconnect between the phone browser and the desktop browser? It seems odd that the phone could carry the exact experience and state between devices because the Android phone broswer is based on Google Chrome and the webtop browser is straight-up Firefox on Linux. I'm guessing that Motorola couldn't use Chrome because it is proprietary, whereas Firefox is open source, but even the open-source Chromium might have been a better choice.
3. Will overall performance be fast enough that someone could justify doing away with a laptop? In the video we saw stuttery flash performance and other issues. If the docked environment is frustrating to use, the whole concept becomes useless.
4. How much will these docks and laptop hardware cost? By all accounts, they're not junky, so they could run close to $150 or $200. If users don't want to pay the extra cost, then again, these innovations will fall flat.
Firefox browser alongside the phone emulator.
Takeaway
The Motorola Atrix could prove to be a groundbreaking device if they can execute well. The partnership with AT&T might be dangerous, given the lack of support AT&T has given up to this point. With the iPhone dominating their smartphone sales and most of their users under iPhone 4 contracts, AT&T may not be able to change directions quickly enough to sell this device at this time. Still, the phone and the docks exist and there are two major points to take from this new product.
First, it really speaks to how central mobile devices are to the user experience today. While Google tries to push their cloud-centric Chrome OS that is designed to work across all devices, their own partner Motorola went ahead and took the opposite approach, baking continuity into hardware. Motorola's approach seems to say, "Your phone is the most important device you own. It will now not only be with you at all times, but will power the different interfaces and uses necessary." With passive, dummy hardware accessories to the phone, Motorola is splitting the difference between Apple and Google, since Apple is more than happy to sell multiple (expensive) devices that serve different uses. Interestingly, they are also making a play to take care of a new issue facing connected devices. By powering everything by the phone, they maintain that only one data plan and account are necessary, instead of a separate plan for your tablet or your Mifi Mobile Hotspot.
Second, this really speaks to the usefulness of Android. For as much as Mobilified has taken Android to task for not being a great consumer experience, this type of initiative from Motorola could never have been possible without the open source nature of Android. Motorola's software division must have gone deep into the code to make it morph into a more traditional Linux system. Sure, Apple could be working on a similar system by themselves, but we haven't seen it, and it hardly fits into their "premium product" linup. You can also be sure that Microsoft would not give this type of control over to OEMs with their new Windows Phone 7.
If, and it's a big if, Motorola can deliver an experience that consumers want, they can score a point for innovation that they are rarely known for.