Unveiled at CES 2011, the Motorola Atrix is the most powerful smartphone on the market. It sports a dual-core Cortex-A9, NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor with a 960×540 screen. It has a gig of RAM (probably more than your mom’s PC), 16GB of storage, a MicroSD slot (up to 32GB), and a fingerprint reader. The hardware is definitely top-notch, but that’s not the only reason this device is turning heads. According to PC Magazine:
The Motorola Atrix is the craziest, most radical smartphone at CES. The more I think about it, the more I think it may be the single most interesting product at CES. The Atrix is an entirely new approach to mobile computing, and it’s the first smartphone to take on both the iPad and the netbook market.
How can it do that? Well, it certainly has the power under the hood, but the secret is in it’s use of dual operating systems. The Atrix runs Google’s Android 2.2 alongside a customized Motorola version of Linux. This gives it the ability to transform from a simple smartphone into a netbook or desktop.
Motorola facilitates this transformation with two different docks. One allows the phone to connect to a large LCD and full keyboard like a desktop computer. The second is a laptop form factor with a panel to sit the phone in that is shaped almost like a Macbook Air.
The custom Linux boots in just a few seconds and allows you to run three apps: Firefox 3.6.13, a file manager, and Android-in-a-window. It’s a very interesting mix of mobile and desktop computing, but is still limited mostly to web applications. Flash is also supported.