| Review of the Motorola Atrix |
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The Motorola Atrix is one of the first smartphones on the market with a dual-core processor. That qualifies it as the most powerful smartphone on the market at the time of this review. It also comes with a whopping 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal Flash storage. You can add an additional 32 GB of Flash via a MicroSD card. Last Updated: 19-Mar-2011 |
Before reading this review, please read Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
Another feature that sets it
apart from all other smartphones is a dock that provides a full laptop-style
keyboard and laptop-sized screen. I didn’t get a chance to test this hardware,
and so it is not part of this review.
Most of my comparisons to other hardware will be to the
Samsung Galaxy S Captivate.
In part this is because I actually own one and am familiar with it, but also
because the Galaxy S is a high-end phone that is well suited to making such
comparisons.
The model I tested came from AT&T and it included a number of boneheaded
restrictions that were placed on it by AT&T. With any luck the Bell Mobility
Atrix (and any other models that come out in the Canadian market) won’t be
saddled with those restrictions. For instance, the AT&T model cannot be
reflashed, nor can you install APK files outside of the Android Market.
RF Performance
Click on this link for a full description of
RF Performance, and how to interpret it.
RF Sensitivity: I performed tests of the RF
sensitive over at Square One using the Bell Mobility/Telus HSPA network (because
it’s now damned near impossible to find anywhere in the mall where Rogers is
weak enough to make such comparisons). Performance was compared to the Samsung
Galaxy S. After quite a bit of testing I came to the conclusion that the Atrix
may have been slightly more sensitive, but not by much. Otherwise both phones
produced near-identical results, which is not necessarily great news, because
both can’t really match the RF sensitivity of my old
Nokia N95.
I next tested for what has become widely known as the death grip. This term (and
people’s fascination with it) began with the iPhone 4, which suffered from
massive signal losses if the device was gripped in a certain way. Since then
many other smartphones have been tested and it has been discovered that most
suffer from this to some extent or another. In the case of the Atrix, the
phenomenon is there, but it doesn’t appear to be all that much of an issue.
Although I can see the incoming signal drop 4 to 5 dB when the phone is held
near the bottom, I couldn’t get a call to drop (or worsen noticeably) in an
extremely weak-signal area of the mall.
Audio Performance
Click on this link for a full description of
Audio Performance, and how to interpret it.
Tonal
Balance: Motorola has a well-earned reputation for building phones with
excellent sound quality, though over the years they’ve come out with a few
stinkers. While the Atrix doesn’t have the phenomenally rich tonal quality of
the old Motorola P280, it does come close. Overall
the tonal balance is very good, with no harshness, peakiness, or hollowness to
be found. It would be absolutely perfect if it had the deep bass of the old
P280, but otherwise it’s as damned near perfect as I’ve heard on any phone in
the past few years.
Sound Reproduction: This aspect is also very good,
with excellent reproduction of the nuances of speech and virtually no background
hiss. There is a little more noise in the background than on my Samsung Galaxy S
Captivate, but not a heck of a lot more. It also makes funny noises when certain
sounds are present, but I never noticed them during actual conversations.
Earpiece Volume: Also fabulous. At full volume the
earpiece on the Atrix pumps out globs of clean volume that make it one of the
loudest phones I’d tested of late. Yes, the Samsung Galaxy S with the volume fix
applied is almost as loud, but to achieve that loudness you need to root the
Galaxy S in order to run the application that adjusts the volume setting. No
such fix is necessary with the Atrix, which is loud right out of the box.
Speakerphone: In keeping with the incredible sound
quality of the earpiece, Motorola keeps dead on track with the design of the
speakerphone. It can produce markedly more clean volume than virtually any phone
this side of Motorola’s own iDEN models. It handily beats the Samsung Galaxy S
because not only does it produce a bit more volume, but it does so with far less
sympathetic vibrations inside the speaker.
When it comes to playing high-quality audio however (such as music or the
soundtrack of a video) the built-in speaker demonstrates that it was designed to
be a speakerphone first and a multimedia speaker second (which is exactly the
opposite of most phones). Don’t get me wrong, the sound quality is still good,
but it sounds less natural than the speaker on the Galaxy S.
Outgoing Audio: Given the fantastic incoming audio
I expected nothing less from the outgoing sound. In my first test I recorded a
message to my voicemail using the Atrix in a quiet room, followed by a recording
made from my Galaxy S in the same quiet room. I was shocked at just how poor the
audio sounded. It was shallow and muffled compared to the Samsung phone, which
sounded pretty darned good.
Following that disappointing test I checked the setting for noise cancellation
and I found it set to normal (which seems to be the default). I turned it off
and I repeated the test, finding that the audio quality improved, but not enough
to match the much better tonal quality of the Samsung. However, the test clearly
demonstrated how much damage the noise cancellation can do to outgoing audio.
Just for fun I set noise cancellation to high and I tried again. It sounded
pretty much the same as it had with the feature set to normal.
Tests in a moving car revealed that while the noise cancellation did its thing,
it did so at the expense of voice quality (which isn’t exactly stellar to begin
with). With noise cancellation turned off however, there was noticeable
background noise, but the voice quality did not suffer as a result. This is a
compromise you will have make when setting up your Atrix.
Over at Square One the phone was tested near the noisy food court. Once again,
the noise cancellation feature did its job, but surprisingly there was less
damage to the outgoing audio under those specific conditions.
However, because the Atrix can’t produce outgoing audio that is anywhere near as
good as the Galaxy S, I have to rate it as mediocre, because if you check my
review of the Galaxy S you’ll find that I didn’t exactly give that phone high
praise for outgoing sound.
Support Features
Ringer Volume: As I’ve often noted in recent
reviews, the volume of the ringer is directly tied to the volume and quality of
the speakerphone. Because the Atrix has an excellent speakerphone, it also has
very loud and very clear ringtones.
Keypad Design: The Atrix doesn’t have a keyboard,
and so all input is via the virtual keypad provided on the touchscreen. I don’t
know if the one provided with the Atrix is just stock Android, or one thrown
together by Motorola, but it lacks many of the useful features found on other
customized implementations (particularly the one Samsung provides). However,
this is Android after all and you can put in any keyboard you like, in which
case you aren’t limited to the pedestrian implementation provided by Motorola,
and you can always use Swype, which is installed on the Atrix by default.
Display: The Atrix has a 4-inch display boasting a
resolution of 960 x 540, which is an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. That’s slightly
different from the norm, which is 1.67:1 (usually in the form of 800 x 480). The
extra pixels mean that the Atrix can display more on the screen than a typical
high-end Android phone, but there are a few gotchas.
Some applications, especially games, assume 800 x 480 and as a result they don’t
fill the entire Atrix screen. That wouldn’t be so bad if the touch areas scaled
equally, but they don’t. When playing Asphalt 5 on the Atrix I found that I had
to touch the buttons above where they appeared on the screen. I’m sure this will
be fixed in future releases of the apps, and many use stock display elements
that correctly scale anyway. This isn’t huge issue, but you may find that some
apps look funny.
Trying to judge the LCD display of the Atrix after being spoiled rotten by the
incredible Super AMOLED display of the Galaxy S is difficult. I compared the
displays side-by-side and the Atrix looks washed-out and old-fashioned by
comparison. Both screens generate the same maximum brightness, but the Super
AMOLED display has richer more saturated color and its blacks are jet black
(rather than gray as they look on the Atrix). The response speed of the LCD
screen on the Atrix is markedly inferior to the Super AMOLED display on the
Galaxy S and that really shows during fast scrolling.
However, if you’ve never had the opportunity to be spoiled by a Super AMOLED
display, then the LCD screen of the Atrix will actually impress you. Its higher
resolution and reasonable color clarity make look almost as good as an iPhone 4
(but not quite).
Icing on the Cake
Dual-core Processor: The big claim-to-fame of the
Atrix is that it has one of the first dual-core processors ever put in a
smartphone. Essentially, dual-core means the same thing here as it does on your
desktop or laptop computer. It means that the processor is actually two
independent processors that can work on different things at the same time
without bogging each other down. However, it does not mean that any single
application will run twice as fast. Most applications will run exactly the same
on a 1 GHz dual-core processor as they do on a 1 GHz single-core processor.
In theory however, having two cores should result in a more responsive UI,
because even when there’s some heavy processing going on in the background, the
UI can operate on one core while the background thread uses the other. As far as
I could tell, this does seem to be the case in the Atrix. The UI remained smooth
and responsive, even when I had something processor-intensive (such as
installing an app) running in the background. I also noticed that embedded video
(via Flash 10.1) ran more smoothly on the Atrix than it did on the Galaxy S,
which might have been the result of Flash making good use of both cores.
Beyond that however, I couldn’t find anything that made the Atrix seem any
faster than the single-core Galaxy S. This may change over time as more apps are
written to take advantage of the dual cores. As has been the case with Windows
software though, don’t expect a very high percentage of the apps to be written
any differently just because the device they are targeting has a dual-core
processor. It didn’t happen in Windows, and will likely not happen with
smartphones.
The bottom line is that the Atrix provides a smoother user experience as a
result of having the dual-core processor, but because the speed of the cores is
the same as the current high-end single-core phones on the market, it doesn’t
really offer much else in terms of faster performance.
HSPA+: The Atrix is billed as a 4G phone (at least
by AT&T) because it supports 14.4 megabit HSPA+, rather than usual 7.2 megabit
HSPA of most other high-end smartphones. Unfortunately the model that I tested
was from AT&T and they cap upload speeds at just 350 kilobits per second (as
does Rogers on most of their phones, including the Galaxy S) and so in that
regard the Atrix was no better than a CRIPPLED HSPA phone.
Where I did expect to see some improvement was in the download speeds, but I
rarely managed to get transfer rates much higher than those I usually saw on my
Galaxy S. Typically speeds were between 2 and 3 megabits, though I did see a
high of 5.8 megabits at around 2 in the morning. I have seen speeds as high as
6.0 megabits using my Galaxy S, and so this doesn’t seem like an improvement. I
also did not see any improvement in ping times. Typically I see between 95 and
180 milliseconds on the Galaxy S. Surprisingly the Atrix averaged between 130
and 250 milliseconds, which is poor.
Only when the phone was in very close proximity to a site was the signal ever
clean enough to render transfer rates that were high enough to prove that the
HSPA+ feature was actually working. When sitting inside of Square One near one
of the indoor site antennas I did once see a transfer rate in excess of 8
megabits per second. Most of the time however, the speed was between 1 and 3
megabits, which is about par for a standard HSPA device. These latter speed
tests were performed on the Bell Mobility/Telus HSPA network.
Camera: The Atrix comes with a 5 megapixel camera
that can also shoot 720p video at 30 frames per second. This spec is identical
to most high-end Samsung phones, including the Galaxy S, but that’s where the
similarity ends. Compared to the Samsung camera, the Motorola model is
sub-standard. It starts with the lackluster camera app that ships with the
Atrix. It has far less flexibility than the camera app in the Galaxy S and that
limits how creative you can be.
The quality of the photos is well below that of the Samsung. Pictures lack
crispness, which might be because the Atrix doesn’t include image stabilization,
which the Galaxy S does. The photos all seem to have odd color casts in the
shadows that make pictures look weird to say the least. I took various pictures
out my back window and the trunk of the maple tree in the backyard looks
decidedly red, whereas it looks its natural brown in shots taken with the
Samsung. Note that all comparisons were performed on a computer after the
pictures had been transferred there.
When it comes to video, the Atrix does even worse. While neither the Atrix nor
the Galaxy S is going to supplant a dedicated camcorder, the quality of the
videos made with the Samsung blow the Atrix out of the water. The Atrix videos
look decidedly smeary when the image is panned and the auto exposure goes
totally nuts as the lighting changes during the pan. This produces odd color
casts to the entire image that change as the scene pans.
The camera does however have a fairly powerful dual-LED flash, which actually
works quite well. Unfortunately you are required to use the flash when doing
macro photography, which isn’t always the best way to light-up something that
close to the lens.
GPS: Like most high-end Android phones the Atrix
includes built-in GPS. It seems to have good sensitivity and can lock onto a lot
of satellites under problematic conditions, but I discovered a rather annoying
issue with the results returned by the GPS receiver. Motorola seems to believe
their GPS is way more accurate than most, because it I’ve seen it report an
accuracy of 2 meters (roughly 6 feet). That would be an achievement to cheer for
if it weren’t for the fact that it placed me inside a house two doors down.
That’s hardly 2 meters accuracy. Also, even while reporting this astounding
accuracy my position would suddenly shift at least 10 or 15 meters away, stay
there for 5 or 10 seconds, and then shift back.
However, I’ll give the Atrix a good rating for the GPS because of its receiver
sensitivity, which should allow it to lock onto the satellites in places where
other phones just can’t do a thing.
Battery Life: The Atrix comes with a fairly hefty
1930 mAh battery, which helps to offset the heavier drain caused by the
dual-core processor. In heavy use the battery seems to drain at about the same
rate as the 1500 mAh battery on my Galaxy S. Subsequently I would estimate about
4 to 6 hours of solid use, depending upon how much 3G data you transfer. One
interesting limitation of the Atrix is that its hardware only reports the
battery’s charge status in 10% increments. I don’t know what the norm is, but my
Galaxy S reports the battery’s charge in 1% increments.
App Incompatibility: Once again, I don’t know how
much of this can be blamed on AT&T and how much is the result of poor design on
Motorola’s part, but here’s what I noticed. In the video game Asphalt 5 I
observed strange polygons appearing in the rendered images from time to time.
One of the best places to see this is while looking at the blue Austin Mini
rotating on the platform at the beginning of the game. On the Galaxy S the
paintwork on the car looks natural, but on the Atrix strange triangles appear
and disappear in the car’s painted surfaces.
I also installed the program called Hi-Q MP3 Recorder, which I used frequently
on my Galaxy S. The program records your voice with exceptional clarity when set
to create 128 kilobit MP3 files. When I made a recording on the Atrix I noticed
the sound meter was pinned. When I played it back I could just barely hear my
own voice under a sea of noise. I uninstalled and reinstalled the app, but that
didn’t help.
As previously noted, the new-and-unusual screen size and aspect ratio doesn’t
work well on some apps. Generally these are games, but I saw oddball stuff in
other apps as well. For example, in the highly popular
SPEEDTEST.NET app the speedometer is
correctly centered, but the “Begin Test” and “Test Again” buttons are skewed to
the left. There doesn’t appear to be a problem with the touch areas, such as I
found with Asphalt 5. Most apps run without any issues however, and so this
problem may or may not bother you much.
Conclusions
From the point-of-view of a phone, the Atrix is among the best out there with
exceptional incoming audio and a terrific speakerphone implementation. Only the
less-than-perfect outgoing audio spoils the otherwise excellent phone. As a
smartphone, the dual-core processor makes the devices at least seem speedier,
even if it doesn’t actually result in any meaningful increase in the execution
time of most apps. The high-res screen is a welcome addition, even if it doesn’t
match the astounding quality of Samsung Super AMOLED displays.
So the bottom line: this is a good smartphone, but it’s hardly perfect. It
excels in some areas and lags in others, so my recommendation is to take stock
of what’s important to you and see if the Atrix excels at those aspects.
