Motorola Atrix hands-on photos

The Motorola Atrix is a dual-core smart phone that you can trick out with various accessories, including a full-sized keyboard and screen.

Flora Graham

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Flora Graham

Jan. 24, 2011 4:43 a.m. PT

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The Motorola Atrix is a dual-core powerhouse of a smart phone that hopes to be all gadgets to all people, thanks to a range of docks that turn it into an alarm clock, a media centre and a netbook.

It's about time we could use our pricey, powerful phones to perk up our out-of-date TVs and laptops. But it's a bit of a mind messer, since the Atrix offers three different operating systems based on how you're using it -- Android for the phone, a media centre for the TV, and a Firefox browser for the netbook.

But even if you don't fancy all the Atrix's accessories, you might still fall for the phone itself. With a dual-core 1GHz processor and a high-resolution screen, not to mention an innovative fingerprint reader to unlock the phone, the Atrix has plenty to recommend it.

We've got a smorgasbord of hands-on photos with the Atrix and all its pretty outfits, so click the gallery above to watch the montage, then read our in-depth preview here and watch our explanatory hands-on video here.

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Swiping the screen and typing a password could be a thing of the past with the Atrix's fingerprint reader, which gives the phone biometric security.

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The Atrix has Android 2.2 Froyo on board, which means access to zillions of apps on the Android Market.

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The Atrix stuffs 960x540 pixels into a 4-inch screen, which Motorola calls 'qHD' -- and we call gorgeous.

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A simple charging and syncing dock could replace your bedside clock, and you can set it up with different shortcuts and preferences for multiple docks -- the idea being that you might want easy access to different features depending on whether the phone is docked in your kitchen or on your desk, for example.

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When you dock your phone in the media dock, you get your choice of a media centre or the Firefox browser to show on your TV.

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The media dock includes a full-sized HDMI port and three USB ports.

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The webtop OS brings the full Firefox browser to your TV screen, and you also access Android and its apps at the same time. The phone's Android interface is shown as a window on the desktop.

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You can control the phone while it's in the media dock with any Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, but Motorola's own keyboard includes Android buttons -- home, back, search and menu -- to make it easier.

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There's also a media centre on the phone, which is very simple and can be controlled with this handy remote.

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The laptop dock looks pretty normal, but it only runs Firefox and Web apps, not a full operating system such as Windows 7.

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The phone pops into the back of the laptop dock to act as its brains -- the dock is only a screen, keyboard, speakers and battery.

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If you have to run, you can't really leave the phone in the laptop dock, since it sticks out. But if you remove and replace the phone, everything remembers where you left it.