Published in News

Smartphone and tablet converge

by on02 May 2011


The less useful meets the useless
Motorola is spending a lot of time and money merging the smartphone and the tablet.

The new Atrix smartphone-laptop combo will be rolled out as Android "alternatives" to tablets and other toys. Reviews for the best suggest that when it is operating in a laptop configuration it is a bit sluggish.

Sanjay Jha, chairman and chief executive officer of Motorola Mobility, has lots of plans for Atrix, which he sees as an "alternative" way of merging smartphones and computing. Yeah, he is talking about an iPad alternative but the Atrix has the advantage that it is actually designed to be useful in a desktop framework, where as tablets are about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Jha's theory is that you will see multiple devices from Motorola and it will expand its range of lap-dock devices so we cover a wider price range and deal with enterprise and consumer customers. One thing he is looking at is a Motorola phone on a quad-core processor that when plugged into the laptop dock would provide performance that's a lot closer to a true laptop than current Atrix products.

We suspect that if you will stick it to your ear it might catch fire. Your ear, not the tablet.
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