It's just a very competent device all around, with a few excellent, standout attributes like the qHD display (960x540), massive battery, HDMI out, fingerprint reader, dual core Tegra CPU and of course, like you mentioned, the dock options.

4" is a great display size, and obviously a specific design goal since larger displays are available. 4" at the qHD gives it ~275 PPI which will be excellent for text. A 5MP camera on the sensor sizes usually implemented in a phone will be more than enough.

I don't think we're going to see any phone that leaps ahead an order-of-magnitude in terms of performance or specs, this is just the next incremental update that appears to do some things as well as other phones, some things better and has the potential to be much quicker (depending on how the OS/Moto/AT&T pan out).

The notebook dock is a notable new model for phones, though I think the phone is pretty outstanding without considering it.

 

AT&T and Verizon are geographically sensitive, so it's really a YMMV situation. Everywhere I go in my regular casual and business travel, AT&T is pretty solid (Jacksonville, DC, Pittsburgh and all in between). Funny enough, the signal here at the home/office is kind of crappy

I think there's a big hit on usability with phones. After being exposed to an iPad (and having used a couple of gens of iPhones and my Captivate), I've got to say, the tablet experience is much better, and pushes the device model much closer to a PC.

I've got to ride on Uncle Stevie's sack too and agree with him: I think 7" and smaller tabs just close in on the phone experience too much, and the big change in usability comes with 9-10"+ sized tablet devices.

We'll eventually add on on this end, heck, the wife is using her iP4 for all sorts of chores around the house like running the HTPC with Mobile Mouse, web/email, reading books via Kindle, etc.

For casual use, I'd always pick it up over any of our laptops.

 

The xoom will be sold by AT&T later this year.

AT&T Plans to Sell Motorola’s iPad Competitor the Xoom | PadGadget

 

I know this is all off thread but the the xoom part isn't even the coolest part of the link; (well, actually, it's the link to All things Digital which I found in your link) the coolest part is that the higher ups at AT&T are considering a "pool plan" for multiple devices, where you pay once for data and have access on more than one piece of hardware. That would be effin awesome!

http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110207/atts-chief-marketing-officer-on-how-the-company-has-found-android-religion/

That part of the text is almost the very bottom, by the way.

 

longtime iphone user and shortime captivate user. the voice network experience was the exact same. i lived in dallas not long ago (att's hq, btw) and i would frequently drop calls in the same spot for both phones. It was presumably during a hand-off from one tower to the next, or some focalized deadspot, but i could literally countdown to the moment the phone would drop the call. all that being said, i do not experience a great amount of dropped calls ( i don't spend hours on the phone however).

oddly though, web surfing on captivate killed my iphone 3g and narrowly beat out my iphone4. I also put it on par with evo on wimax. actual dl speed may vary but that was my consistent web experience.

 

I think its worth it without the dock. A bump up in screen specs, Ram specs, cpu/gpu specs, HDMI mirroring.

Its like any other newcoming phone that has updated specs.