Why I returned mine the DAY AFTER
March 17th 2011 I was the first one at my local Bell store and got the Atrix with the labtop dock. Brought it home, played around with it and thought it was the BEST. I used the labtop dock and noticed that it you were able to stretch the phone's screen to any size, that was pretty cool. But then I also noticed that when you use any of the apps on the phone through the dock it SEVERELY impedes the performance of the Atrix. I loaded Angry Birds and found that it had a hard time running it, even if the mirrored screen was skewed to a smaller size. I then noticed that Motorola made NO effort to offer an "App killer", thus 70% of the phone's processorwas focused on running almost ALL the apps available on the phone in the background. After I finally got App Killer Pro on the phone, I was able to kill SOME of the apps. But after I opened a SINGLE game application, I noticed there were TONS of apps running in the background. This frustrated me to no end, the processor's speed was the same if not a little worse than other smartphones. I ran a few benchmarks on the Atrix and found that it only slightly came out on-top compared to other smartphones (Galaxy S's, HTC's etc..) in performance. But if you compare graphics, thats a whole different subject.
At first glance, if you haven't had a smartphone (with good display such as Galaxy S's or others), you wouldn't be able to tell whether the display was good or not. But after I took my brothers phone (Galaxy S Vibrant) and compared them side by side, I found that the display on the Atrix was TERRIBLE!! I couldn't believe how bad the display was on this phone. As a test, I loaded a downloaded HDTV xVID version of Simpsons onto the Atrix and my brother (with his Vibrant) STREAMED the same episode of Simpsons on his phone. Right away you could tell that the Atrix's display was grayish and horrible looking. Sure, the picture was KIND of clear, but nowhere clear enough to justify horrible picture. The Vibrant, although streaming from a website, still produced a better picture than the Atrix. In a second test we loaded the Vibrant with the HDTV xVID version and found that it was both CLEAR and had a beautifully colourful picture. For example, the skin colour of the Simpsons were GLOWING with bright yellow tones, whereas the Atrix produced a brown-ish colour of yellow. I was shocked. Perhaps the camera is good on the Atrix atleast? Nope. Not at all, the camera shoots poor video and captures very poor pictures. The flash only makes it WORSE.
Suppose you don't mind not having FULL "dual-core" processor speeds, and you don't mind a terrible camera or not having a good display (of which you'll be looking at for 90% of the phones usage), and you say that the Atrix has the cool labtop dock feature which NO other smartphone has. That's hardly a good argument. I bought the labtop dock for a whopping $329.95 (plus tax, which totaled to about $355.26 in Canada). In comparison, you could get a brand new labtop for that much with more than TRIPLE the computing power of the Atrix. But lets set that aside, and look at the labtop dock. ALL it does, is mirror the Atrix's screen and allows you to browse the internet without viewing through the mirrored screen. THAT'S IT. The dock has 2 USB ports, but thats ONLY for mouse and keyboard. You cant plug another cellphone device into it, you cant plug a USB Stick into it. You cant do ANYTHING with it.
Overall, the Atrix was a HORRIBLE purchase. The morning after I bought it brought it back as soon as I could, due to the fact that contracts are bound after 24 hours. Got $508.45 back from the $564.95 I paid for the Atrix and walked away with a Vibrant (a MUCH better phone, period).
