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The long road from the Inspire to the Atrix

Divinedark

Member
Aug 26, 2010
56
13
Good morning all,

I created this thread in the Inspire forums and thought I'd bring it over here too. It's just my experiences as a daily carrier of both of these devices. It's aimed at people torn between the two handsets, and also to help me ultimately choose which I prefer to keep. Only one will survive.

I've included my running updates in the OP.

__________________________________________________ _________________


Hello all!

I've had the daunting task to pick between these two phones for the last couple days. I went into the store to actually get the devices in my hand and fully expected to walk out with the Atrix. I've always had a soft spot for HTC, ever since their WoMo phones. I saw the Inspire and was super impressed at how solid the phone felt in my hand. The phone felt very responsive, and I already knew the XDA Inspire team was cranking out some awesome stuff.

I then grabbed the Atrix and was not nearly as wow'd as I had expected to be. I've been following the phone since it's announcement, and pretty much had made up my mind on the spot to pick it up. After spending a half hour goofing around with both phones, I decided the Inspire really won my heart.

Then it happened... The cold sweats... The tossing and turning in bed at night. Images of the Atrix's Tegra 2 laying waste to the earth and doing vile things to my Inspire. My horrid indecision had struck. I decided that I had obviously made the wrong choice, so the next morning I headed off to the store and bought an Atrix without returning my perfectly set up Inspire. I wanted to play with them both side by side and just return whichever one didn't make me happy.

That was a bit over 24 hours ago. After spending the last day with both of the handsets, I am closer to a decision, but it's damn tough. My overall thoughts and struggles follow:

Motorola Atrix:
-Pros:
- Bright, higher resolution screen
- Dual Core processor (even though I thought the experience was pretty weak)
- Battery (theoretical, as I haven't had it long enough to fully experience)
- This goes to the hardware again, but this phone is quite a bit more future proof.
- The handset is light enough to not remind you it's in your pocket at every step.
- GPS (This is the most rock solid phone GPS I've ever used)
- Incredibly loud speaker
- Tons of ram
- HDMI out

-Cons:
- Cheaper build quality (I feel like I need to qualify this. The phone feels solid, but the battery door is, for lack of a better word, brittle)
- Very poor color representation on the otherwise beautiful screen.
- MotoBlur - This is just a very inelegant, unrefined overlay...
- Strange compatibility issues with certain apps
- multiple force closes (this varied by handset)
- Weak social media integration
- Odd bouts of lag when least expected
- Locked Bootloader (most don't care about this, but it matters when you have a primary developer that has a history of slow patches, feature adds, and os releases.
- Chicklet keyboard is a touch small for me and requires some focus to not miss type.
**FOLLOW-UP**
- I've removed the call quality knock from the Atrix device. It turns out it was entirely my own fault, and while some people, including Motorola, are reporting issues with sound quality on some devices, mine isn't one of them.



HTC Inspire:
-Pros:
- Excellent build quality (the aluminum uni-body is a joy to hold, and has the extra added benefit of being able to be used to fend off an attacker)
- Beautiful 4.3" screen (Yes, it is big, but I'm a fan)
- Sense (I'm not a fan of these proprietary UI's, but Sense shows that HTC can offer up an experience that is easy to like, and provide an attractive interface for a phone OS that is sometimes described as clinical looking)
- The brilliant development community (currently running CoreDroid /drool)
- Very snappy performance from the second gen Snapdragon CPU
- Tons of ram (Not as much as the Atrix, but enough to be a "ton" in my eyes)
- Lovely camera (I used to not care, but I have a new son, so suddenly a camera climbed up the ladder of important features)
- Fantastic out of the box social media integration
- Has that "Just works like it should" feel to it.
- Very clear call quality
- Second best phone gps I've used

-Cons:
- The screen washes out to a grey slab in direct sunlight
- Stock battery life is horrid
- "Electric Razor" ear screen can have some jagged edges and chafe your ear
- Battery door was a ridiculous design decision
- Very current gen hardware (doesn't mean a whole lot if you're not going to be riding this phone for the next two years, but a new day has dawned and it's name is "Multi-core")
- Stock external speaker/notification volume super weak
- odd placement of the number button on the keyboard (thanks iPhone for etching that into my brain)
- recessed power and volume buttons can be a bit tough to find.
- No internal storage (this is just ridiculous)
- Relatively weak GPU

There you have it. That's what I've come up with so far. At the moment, I'm leaning toward the Inspire, as so many of those issues can be (and have been) corrected through roms. In the end, I just don't really get the warm fuzzies from the Atrix. I feel like it's a brilliant set of components tied together with a really sorry software suite, and a manufacturer that doesn't really understand the strengths of their chosen platform, or the customers that choose it.

I will continue carrying both of the devices for the next couple days, but at the moment, the winner is most definitely the Inspire in my eyes. It just feels like it's been polished to a wonderful android flavored candy shine, and with the community behind it, there's really nothing I feel the device won't be able to handle for quite some time.


**Update 1**


The inspire's build quality is top notch. The screen is perfectly alligned and allows no notable give for me. There is also no more light bleed than you expect from an lcd panel, and none to the touch. The battery cover is a pain. Its actually so well fitted that you have to break it in over multiple removals in order to confidently take it off without breaking it. The sim cover fits nicely, and doesn't pose the same pain that the battery cover does. There is a slight raised edge in the center of the sim cover that takes it just out of flush. Its nigh unnoticable. Viewing angles on the inspire's slcd are fantastic. I can see it clearly in a near complete 180 degree angle, with little to no noticable color bleed. It obviously dims as you move from dead center.

The atrix is in the same boat with build quality for the most part. The phone has a good weight, metal rails down the side, well alligned screen, and mostly tight fitting components. I do have some issues here, though. Mainly with the back cover. As noted in my initial post, its very brittle, thin plastic. If you think I broke a sweat taking the inspires battery cover off, you should have seen me trying to get the battery on the atrix. I pulled the top clip free, and almost bent the cover in half fighting the mid phone clips. Also, the back cover on my atrix doesn't line up flush on one side. The last couple issues are the "creakynesss" of the handset. When I grip the phone tightly I can feel the plastic components giving, and settling into place. Not terribly bad, but noticable. The last issue is the fingerprint scanner. It's been pointed out in some reviews, but the scanner is off center on some devices and just looks shoddily thrown together and misalligned.

The atrix beautiful qHD screen also washes out and tints yellow when viewed at extreme angles.


**Update 2**


I've been using the Atrix today as my primary carry handset, and I must say PROPS to Motorola on this battery... I've been beating on it for all I can muster and with almost two full hours of HSPA+ web surfing, Angry Birds while waiting for my food, poking around in the marketplace, and trying out apps, the phone has dropped 25% of the battery in 7 hours of heavy use. I'm pretty damn impressed with that. My focus would be on the charger right now. I'll be going through the exact same process on the Inspire tomorrow to see how everything shakes out.

**Update 3**

I've been carrying my Atrix for the last two days, and I have to admit... It's amazing... I don't mean to sound disappointed, quite the contrary, but I was coming closer to making my decision, and now I'm struggling again.

New Revelations/Findings:

- The little hitches you sometimes see in games like Angry Birds, when scrolling and pinch zooming are all gone... Like, completely gone. That goes for every game/app i've played that is relatively intensive with animation or processing. The Inspire is definitely no slouch, but the performance edge is fully in the Atrix's court.

- The external speaker of the Atrix is LEGEND-(Wait for it)-DARY! I hopped on a conference call last night and it was right on the edge of being as good as the dedicated conference speakers at my office. Really outstanding.

- The screen is also really pretty. I, once again, had to run from hospital to hospital yesterday and while outside was able to see every color, icon, and word on my screen. It made me secure in the fact that no matter where I took the device, i would be able to rely on it 100%, and it would perform as well as I could ever ask for.

I've been using the anti-glare/anti-fingerprint Case-Mate screen protectors on both of the devices since i've purchased them, and these things just destroy the fidelity of the screen. I will be getting my Realook protectors tomorrow, and will get to experience a bit more vibrance from both screens.

I'm still fairly disappointed with the color reproduction of the qHD screen. It's really in your face when you have the two devices sitting side by side. The SLCD screen of the Inspire is much more natural looking.

MotoBlur is still a disappointment, but after setting up LauncherPro Plus and getting Beautiful Widgets, and exploring LauncherPro's new facebook widget (think FriendStream). It's become nearly a non-issue. I've been using ADW as well, and it's great, but the Atrix seems to love LauncherPro, and I love LauncherPro... Guess that's a match made in Android heaven.

**Update 4**

Well, the comparison is over. The Atrix made it's way back to the AT&T store day before yesterday.

What pushed me over the edge?

1.) The dev community. As I have written earlier in this thread, the battery life of the Inspire really caused me to take pause. The Atrix just performed so much better... That was until I ran into Leedroid's Rom. I tried it when I first got my phone, but didn't bother with the SetCPU stuff. Well, while playing with the phone, I flashed from CoreDroid to LeeDroid, and actually ran SetCPU on the default (smartass) setting. I'm STILL on that same charge... I'm not even kidding. I couldn't even believe it.

Also, my other thing that I really held high with the Atrix was the GPS. Well, while out running around in Atlanta, which is the most driver unfriendly place to live, period, I was using the Inspire to navigate. I never had fewer than 5 sats locked constantly. Super accurate, and super stable.

2.) The screen: Yes, the Atrix has a higher res screen... But the pentile matrix just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it was just me (very possible), but I feel like I could see more pixels on the Atrix than the Inspire, regardless of pixel density. Also, color transitions on the Inspire were cleaner. If you used the Atrix with the XDA app, you'd notice on the startup screen distinct gradients of brown, as opposed to a smooth blended transition.

The brightness of the Atrix screen is still something I can't fix with the Inspire. You could see the Atrix screen clearly outside. The Inspire requires some shading to be seen.

3.) Motorola... Yes... Motorola. They absolutely crippled their own hardware by locking it down with their poorly optimized software. If you're going to load the phone down with your poorly received Android skin, so be it. Just make sure you leave the bootloader unlocked so people like the Cyanogen team, DesignGears, and Leedroid can fix it for you if need be.

The phone is a beast, so it's not like the phone was unusable, but you just constantly think about what could have been, and that you will never be able to truly have an Android experience with that device, which in my opinion revolves heavily around the XDA-Developers community and forums.

The brightest light I could shine on this was the HSUPA situation. I have it on the Inspire... Without waiting for AT&T to push it out to me... I have it. The Atrix owners will have to bide their time before they can be on par with the iPhone 4...

It's really an injustice what Motorola did to such an amazing device. I still believe that there will be a time when the Atrix get's it's updates and it makes me once again come to that place where I'm rolling around sweating in bed, wondering if I'd made the right decision.

**Update 5**

Okay... So my last post wasn't actually the last update. I thought I'd throw this in.

I'm currently faced with an issue. My beloved Inspire has a flaw. It's something that people are noticing more and more as their phones are being used. It may turn out to mean very little, but if it get's worse, it will ruin the phone, and cause a major pain to the owners of the phone.

The screen lifts on the bottom right hand side of the phone. People are reporting dust under the glass and a discoloration of the screen when the search button is pushed. I looked over my phone, fairly satisfied that my phone was not seeing any of these issues. Well... Guess what? It is. The screen is raised above the metal frame, and squishes down when I press it. This causes the SLCD panel to compress, bleeding the color out of the screen.

Now, again... This may not mean much in the long run. Maybe it's just the whatever they use to hold the glass on having a hard time holding in that corner, and this is as far as it's going to get, but there's no guarantee. I have 2.5 weeks left on my 30 return policy, but it seems to me that almost every Inspire is seeing something similar to a certain extent. So, I'm back to the big question... What do I do?

I've already decided that I'm the most happy with the Inspire, by the slimmest of margins, but I've also found it hard to give up the development community because Motorola hates it's customers (hehe). This really sucks... I'm now right back where I started, stuck between multiple choices that aren't so very far apart in terms of viability.

Do I return the Inspire? Hope that the one I get from them doesn't have the problem, even though there's no telling if this might happen at some point around the 30 day mark?

Do I just live with it and try to baby the screen? Knowing full well that if dust gets under the glass, I will freak out (slight OCD).

Do I bite the bullet and exchange the phone for the Atrix? I at least know I liked the device, but not as much as the Inspire.

Do I just take the phone back and make due with my Focus until something else comes along?

I don't know... Maybe the lack of sleep and has caused me to overblow this particular issue. I'll revisit this tomorrow. Feel free to leave comments.

**Conclusion**

And in a shocking twist at the tail end of this shootout, after the dust had settled the Inspire stood alone... Then, out of nowhere, the Atrix picked itself up off the blood soaked road, and in true spaghetti western style, shot the Inspire in the back.

The Atrix walks away the victor... For now...
 
Love the write up, entertaining read and good information. Even though my phone 100% stopped working for no reason a little after I had it for a month, and even though I received a refurb that I am not sure if it will give me problems or not, and even though I dont mind motoblur (im afraid to use launcher pro) I think the Atrix is just too delicious to pass up. All of my friends phones play grainy youtube videos at snails pace, their speakers suck, their call quality sucks, and their SPEED sucks. The Atrix rubs me in the right ways even on my second one. The battery life is my favorite features seeing as my previous phone went 5 days with heavy use using Windows Mobile 6.1.
 
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Good write up! After having the Inspire for 28 days, I went with the Atrix primarily for the battery life and the front facing camera. I just got so used to HTC sense. HTC sense > Motoblur. I can live with motoblur. One day, I shall be back in the HTC sense saddle, mark my word.

If you miss Sense, buy Launcher Pro Plu and Beautiful Widget. That's the closest you'll get to sense atm on the Atrix :)
 
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I was caught off guard. I thought for sure you kept the Inspire from reading your post. Even after reading the title, I was still caught off guard.

I can appreciate a write up like this cuz it tells what the person thinks is the pro n con of each device. For custom ROMs the Inspire is the way to go vs. the Atrix. The Atrix out the box will have better battery life.

Nice write up.
 
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