Motorola Atrix - A (less-than) Generic Review

After playing the patience game as long as I could, (READ: Apple iPhone became so laggy and non-responsive) I decided I had had enough of being in the walled garden, and made the decision not only to jump handsets again, but this time carriers as well.

Having spent over 10 years with Roger$, I became fed up with their billing pratices, and seemingly constant new fees, adn value-add marketing calls and junk mail, working with many folks there was a generaly good experience, caveat : only if I was fortunate enough to be branched into their local call center, being routed into Quebec, Ontario or points west in the Roger$ support / account management infrastructure was not only a complete waste of my time, but typically ended up with me explaining my reasonable requests to four or five individuals over the phone without resolution, that is if the initial agent did not painc and just hang up, which occurred to me fairly often when trying to have issues resolved by their organization. /end_rant

So after careful research and some inquiries to g33k colleagues and friends, I opted to give Roger$ the boot in favor of BellAliant. I could name all the things that as a long-time Roger$ customer I have been annoyed or inconvienced by with BellAliant, but the simple truth is: I wanted out from under Roger$' thumb and market gouging.

Quite the preamble! On with the review !!!

While perusing what technological goodies were available on the BellAliant menu, I discovered they had announced the Motorola Atrix! I was very excited, as I was sick of the iPhone 3G application issues, lag, and not interested in jailbreaking as it can leave the handest open to exploitation by malicious code. So I asked the dude working and he confiremd the Atrix did feature the spec sheet they were advertising, over 40 Gigabytes of storage(w/MicroSD), dual-core processing, and 1GB of onboard RAM, HDMI out, and a host of other awesomeness, including a fingerprint scanner for locking/unlocking the handset(I have been fascinated by, and a huge fan of biometrics for years since my first ThinkPad featured this nifty invention)!

I made some phone calls, and did the math for what penalties I would incur by leaving Rogers, and even after tallying up the bill, I still decided to make the leap, after all, I have always been a fan of Moto handsets, and was sick of both my iPhone and Rogers, so I cancelled service and signed up for the Motorola Atrix.

IN THE BOX :

Unboxing the Atrix finds a generous helping of goodies for a change from any previous Moto products I've owned in the past: the handset, 3.5mm wired headset w/inline mic, Mini USB to USB cable, USB charging plug, MiniHDMI to HDMI cable.

The Atrix itself is a sleek phone, running Android 2.2.2 since the recent BellAliant network-prompted update package. More to come on the Atrix functionality and applications in the next post in a few hours.

Last note on the intro here: I did buy an OtterBox with the phone. I was hoping iSkin made one, but the nicest I found locally was this one :

I will admit to having been impressed thus far. It's chunky, hard to get in and out of a pants pocket, and rather more stoic than I am used to. The design was obviously to offer maximum protection fpr the handset while trying to minimize the added bulk.

Verdict OtterBox : Does EXACTLY what you expect, is among the best cases I've owned. It's basic black, pro and con there, and it does add to the size of the handset, period.