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Motorola Atrix 4G at Best Buy Feb. 13, Laptop Dock to Cost $150?

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In spite of a prior AT&T leak that Motorola’s flagship Atrix 4G on AT&T’s network would arrive in early March, a leak was revealed that Best Buy may be carrying the unit a few weeks earlier, landing the device on February 13. According to Phandroid, February 13th marks the arrival date of the Atrix 4G at Best Buy stores, though it’s still unclear when the big box electronics retailer intends on selling the device.

The dual-core Tegra 2-powered smartphone debuted to a lot of fanfare at CES. Among the number of powerful features of the smartphone, it will have a Retina-like display, a marketing term coined by Apple for its high resolution iPhone smartphone screen, with a qHD resolution. The 16:9 widescreen display has a resolution of 960 X 540 pixels on a 4.3-inch display, compared to Apple’s iPhone Retina Display of 960 X 640 pixels on a 3.5-inch display; the difference in pixel count is because Motorola had used a widescreen display, making it more narrow than the iPhone 4’s display.

Also, another powerful feature is the device’s Laptop Dock accessory, which pairs with the phone to give users a smartbook or netbook form factor with a larger display, keyboard, and the ability to power and use the phone for up to 8 hours in this laptop-like mode. What’s neat is that the browser, when used in the Laptop Dock, will allow users to not only have a desktop-like tabbed browsing experience, but that users can also have multiple, re-sizable browser windows. Additionally, users can also control the phone’s interface while in the Laptop Dock. The Laptop Dock itself doesn’t provide any processing power when in use–the heavy lifting is done by the Atrix 4G and its NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core gigahertz CPU.

According to Phandroid, the Laptop Dock accessory is rumored to cost $150 and will extend the utility of the phone for business travelers who may want all their data in one place–rather than juggling between a laptop and smartphone–or would want an inexpensive, easily replaceable laptop/netbook without having the cost associated with a laptop or netbook; at the rumored $150 price, Motorola’s Laptop Dock comes in at under the cost of an average $300 netbook.

The Atrix 4G will utilize AT&T’s HSPA+ network rather than the carrier’s more advanced LTE network, which is still being developed. Like T-Mobile USA, AT&T is using marketing to described its evolving 3G HSPA network as a 4G standard, which will offer a theoretical 14.4 Mbps download speed.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. dstrauss

    01/25/2011 at 3:02 pm

    And to think I was part of the crowd, four years ago, making fun of Jeff Hawkins and Palm for developing then canning the Foleo which was a CPU-less netbook which got all of its data and processing power from a Treo smartphone (the pres even dubbed it the Fooleo). The poor guys were just way ahead of their time (and teh then current state of processing power). Wonder if there aren’t some Palm patents lying in the tall weeds of HP about to spring on Motorola…

  2. PeighDay

    01/25/2011 at 6:38 pm

    I thought it had a 4 inch screen.

  3. Sdfaljasldfj

    01/25/2011 at 9:27 pm

    CHECK THAT FACTS: Screen is 4 inches not 4.3.

  4. Bigmouth

    01/26/2011 at 5:13 pm

    I want this phone so badly, but the inability to install custom ROMs like Cyanogen is a nonstarter. Wake up, Motorola, developers are your friends!

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