Motorola Atrix dual-core phone wants to kill your laptop -- with Firefox

Motorola is gunning for your laptop with its new Atrix phone -- and Firefox is the ammo. The Atrix is a dual-core monster of an Android smart phone that runs the full desktop Firefox 3.6 browser via a nifty laptop dock.

Plug your Atrix into the back of this 11.6-inch screen and bingo, there's the proper Flash-heavy Internet running on your phone. You can even use a mouse and keyboard, either USB or Bluetooth.

Another media dock lets you pipe HD video to your TV, while a vehicle dock suckers on to your windscreen for Google Maps sat-nav duty and easy music playing. All three docks are sold separately.

The Atrix runs a user interface called 'webtop', which is designed to translate Android to a bigger screen. We don't know what other features webtop offers, but we're looking forward to a full hands-on with this very soon.

Motorola says the Atrix is packing a chip with two cores running at 1GHz, and 1GB of RAM. 16GB of internal storage is backed up by up to 32GB of extra microSD space, while front (VGA) and rear (5-megapixel) cameras offer video chat and 720p recording.

The Atrix has a fashionably large 4-inch screen with a resolution of 960x540 pixels, which Moto is calling 'qHD' -- quarter high definition. While that's technically correct, it's rather self-effacing. We'd say that was more like half high definition, as it's the number of lines that count, but perhaps hHD isn't as snappy.

That huge screen makes it quite a chubber, mind. At 11m thick, 64mm wide and 118mm long, it's bigger all round than the iPhone 4, although it manages to weigh in at 135g, 2g less than Apple's latest.

Other bits and bobs include two mics with noise-reduction tech for clearer phone calls, the ability to make a Wi-Fi hotspot and a biometric fingerprint reader for extra security.

The only small fly in this potent mobile ointment is that the Atrix runs Android 2.2, which will seem distinctly old hat when it launches in the second quarter of the year. We expect to see more top of the range phones at Mobile World Congress next month running Android 2.3, which the Google Nexus S already offers.

Motorola hasn't announced pricing for the phone or the separate docks, or a specific release date. Orange will have the Atrix first, but other network availability hasn't been confirmed.

Click through our photo gallery for some PR images of the Atrix -- we'll have some better hands-on pics for you as soon as possible. So what do you think? Would this potentially replace your laptop? Does dual-core Android running Firefox get your geek juices flowing? Let us know in the comments.

Update: Motorola has now supplied us with full specs for the Atrix, so we've updated the piece.