Gallery: Hands-On With Motorola's @$#%ing Atrix Superphone
01motorola-atrix
LAS VEGAS — Motorola in a Wednesday press conference introduced the Atrix, its first smartphone armed with a dual-core processor. Then the company opened a demo booth showing off the Atrix but refused to allow press to touch it. [](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/ces-2011)I managed to score some hands-on time with the Atrix, but only after dropping several F-bombs, grabbing my camera away from an over-zealous product manager who put his paw over the lens, and nearly throwing a fist. Eventually, a manager put in a phone call and gave me clearance. So I held the phone. I photographed the phone. And here are my clenched-fist impressions of Motorola's Atrix. For a stupid @#$%ing phone, it's pretty awesome.
02side
The Atrix has a smooth, textured body that feels sturdy and comfortable when gripped. Holding it for the first time, I could already tell it was a higher-quality handset compared to previous Android phones. Indeed, the Atrix seemed very zippy. While most Android phones show some choppiness while scrolling a web page, for example, that problem didn't appear in the Atrix.
03webtop
There's an HDMI port on the side of the phone for you to connect to a larger display or Motorola's WebTop Dock. The WebTop Dock is where the Atrix gets extra cool. When you dock the Atrix onto the WebTop Dock, it directs its output to an external display in a desktop-like user interface that looks a lot like Mac OS X.
04webtop-mode
Motorola created a new Android-based environment for WebTop. You can use a mouse and a keyboard to click around WebTop as if it were a normal computer. From my testing, WebTop was slow with browsing web pages — perhaps because of the crummy AT&T signal here in Vegas — but I got a YouTube video up and running, and it was really neat.
05media-mode
If you don't purchase a WebTop dock (it's a separate accessory), you can still hook up the Atrix directly to a display through the HDMI port. When you do that, it switches to a lightweight media viewer mode for you to play music, pics and videos. Pretty rad for a phone that Motorola doesn't want people to touch or photograph yet.
