Gadgetory

in February of last year Motorola brought us the original Atrix a high-end Android smartphone with a lot of innovative features less than a year later they brought us the Atrix 2 which carried almost as many down grades as it did upgrades and today we have the third iteration of the Atrix line does this newest device enhance the prestige of the Atrix brand and bring it back to prominence or does it just keep dragging it through the mud of mediocrity let's find out I'm Michael Fisher this is PocketNow comm and this is the Motorola Atrix HD full review let's check it out we've been reviewing a lot of hardware from Samsung from HTC and other overseas OEMs here in PocketNow boston offices so it's nice to get our hands on some motorola hardware so we can see how American Hardware stacks up against those competitors I used to sell Motorola handsets when I worked at Nextel so it's been interesting to see how Motorola's current Hardware measures up against their past offerings and on the hardware side this device has been quite a treat while the Samsung Galaxy s3 doesn't feel quite as cheap and flimsy as some other phones it's definitely not a phone you feel like you can beat up by any means and like many other phones it's covered in that glossy coating that scratches easily by contrast the Atrix HD feels built to last with a substantial feeling in the hand reminiscent of the Droid RAZR MAXX it weighs about 140 grams which is actually pretty standard but the materials feel very robust we've got Corning Gorilla Glass up front here covering the four point five inch TFT LCD LCD panel just one LCD there and around the back the casing is covered in a kevlar micro weave pattern that you can see up close here that Motorola has just stolen right from its own Droid Razr line that I mentioned a second ago the casing flares out more gradually than it does on the right giving the phone a thicker feeling overall but it also rests very very nicely in the hand overall so that's not a bad thing down in front here we've got the AT&T branding below the display I like it because it's subtle but it's also very easy to mistake for a home button so some people may be annoyed by that above the display here is the Motorola branding the earpiece 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera and there's a hidden LCD down there as well off to the right here are the power button and volume keys these are plastic so they feel a little on the cheap side but the power button is ridged so it's easy to tell apart from the volume rocker by feel that's a very nice touch returning to the back side here we revisit the Kevlar microwave which just gives this device such a nice unique look and a great smooth feel in the hand under it is a 1780 milliamp hour non removable battery and above it we have this big lens for the 8 megapixel camera the LED flash and the speakerphone grill at the top and at the bottom barely visible here are two out of the three microphones that drive the crystal talked plus noise reduction feature more on that a little bit later and the left side here there's not much to talk about except the micro SD and micro SIM card slots living under this shared door that's microSD expansion up to 32 gigabytes and finally up top we've got ports for the micro USB HDMI out and the three-and-a-half millimeter headphone jack a little side note the micro USB port on our device was very particular about what it liked it didn't really appreciate other chargers very much especially not our portable power pack that caused us some problems considering this battery is as we mentioned non removable you may want to stock up on stock motorola chargers just in case if you are a power user otherwise the device is finished in Motorola's nano coating which protects it from splashes which is a very very nice touch overall the Atrix HD feels a bit like a beefed up razor or razor max with the slightly budget feel because of its blessed aggressive styling it's more exciting than the Atrix to was and it feels reassuringly durable but it's not gonna win any beauty contests underneath all that we're looking at some pretty respectable specs the Atrix HD runs a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor at 1.5 gigahertz backed up by one gig of ram there's eight gigs of storage only 4.7 of which is user accessible so it's a good thing there's that 32 gigabyte microSD expansion option a quick word about that LCD panel this is a display with very very high pixel density and it matches or beats the iPhone 4 and 4s Retina display it's sharp its colorful thanks to Motorola's color boost and it's pretty bright the only complaints I have are it's daylight performance and it's blacks reproduction which could be better but that's the case with most LCDs the screen on this device is definitely one of its high points so that's what's under the hood let's talk about what all that hardware is running motorola has included a very close to stock build of Android ICS 4.4 with the Atrix HD it's one of the few non Nexus phones so far to ship with the Nexus like Android soft keys set of capacitive Hardware buttons but it's not stock ICS and it only takes a quick look at the homescreen to realize that in this case it's a good thing the lock screen gives you the option to jump directly into the phone the messaging or the camera applications in addition to just the straight unlock the phone and the good times do continue when you do unlock the phone and end up at the home screen when you're getting rid of all the bloat try to resist the urge to throw this handy widget out with the bathwater here these bubbles are actually quite useful showing you digital and analog time the weather in multiple cities and your battery life and data allotment here in addition to a shortcut to the settings menu the big one here also displays your last text or missed call which is really really handy it's a very handy little widget overall and we like it a lot other elements closely resemble stock ice-cream sandwich like the launcher here with the widgets and the separate tab and the notification drawer which has the swipe of all notification dismissal there but there are other little nice touches throughout the OS any icon with these little arrows displayed next to it is swipeable so it's expandable if you swipe up instead of tapping on it you get a nice little preview pane with for example in this case your text messages and we haven't actually opened the app we can tap out to get back out of it same with the phone app where you can see your missed calls we're not actually opening these apps we're just opening a little preview pane that's very handy and very very useful and of course there's the smart actions that Motorola popularized with the razor line for custom rules that governs the phone's behavior so that you can save power in various situations and so forth unfortunately not all of Motorola's software work has enhanced the Android experience in short the Atrix HD is laggy it's odd because on the spec side it's plenty powerful and it did just fine on our series of benchmarks so it should be able to handle Android just fine but it can't lag is persistent throughout the UI especially in the multitasking view which is being quick now of course because we've got the camera on it but it often takes several seconds just to appear very very annoying and there's also a very annoying scroll lag in the stock browser where taps are excuse me swipes are sometimes interpreted as taps that's very very irritating once again we're faced with an OEM that couldn't resist tampering with the stock keyboard Motorola's implementation isn't as bad as the one we ran into on the highway p1 ascend but it's not good by any means out of the box haptic feedback was turned down almost all the way and there was no audio feedback so it was hard to know when a key had actually been pressed also the device would constantly miss keystrokes that even moderate typing speeds switching the keyboard out for the stock ICS keyboard immediately solved our problems but we shouldn't have had to do that just like we shouldn't have to install Swift key manufacturers there are better ways to differentiate than to meddle with the keyboard by making it worse the stock ICS keyboard is wonderful please leave it alone our real-world testing of the Atrix HD revealed something of a mixed bag across the board depending on what feature of the phone you're talking about battery life was in line with most other mid-range Android smartphones we've tested which is to say mildly disappointing more disappointing is the camera performance which leaves a lot to be desired despite that big lens and the beefy 8 megapixels on the spec sheet shots often come out either over or underexposed and those are due to bad automatic exposure settings where this can be corrected for on other devices through the use of an HDR setting that's not true on the Atrix HD HDR is inexplicably absent these problems persist in the video camera which also has trouble with automatic white balance and exposure compared to higher end cameras like that of the galaxy s3 or even the Droid Incredible 4G LTE now where the phone shined was in voice calls Motorola's crystal talk plus a noise reduction isn't just a brand name it really works wonderfully data speeds over 18 T's LTE network were excellent in the Greater Boston area we experienced great coverage and outstanding throughput both on the phone and while tethering the phone also ran games just fine explained 9 is my go-to tester and it handled that alright it's true that X plane isn't the most demanding of games but if you're a gamer you're not going to be buying this mid-range phone anyway the Atrix HD is available through AT&T with a two-year contract for $99 so should you buy it well it's got robust hardware and it brings the razor design aesthetic to AT&T from Verizon it's got great voice performance and the LTE speeds are awesome and $99 is a good price but the software problems in particular the lag aren't something I would want to deal with over the course of a two-year contract true there will probably be a bug-fix release at some point to fix some of those issues but it's tough to know exactly when or if that'll happen OTA fixes tend to be unpredictable no matter what om you're talking about so without knowing that it's really tough to recommend the Atrix HD we want to love it because of its hardware but the software just isn't fully baked enough for us to do that not yet we give the Motorola Atrix HD a three out of five this has been michael fisher with pocketnow.com be sure and check out our full review at pocketnow.com leave a comment there if you have something to add to the discussion leave us a like here on youtube if you liked this video and be sure and follow us on twitter at pocket now twits for the official pocket now account or you can follow me at captain two phones that's captain the number two phones we always tweet when we post new content which shows up all the time so until the next piece comes down the pipe thank you very much for watching stay tuned for the next video and we'll see you next time in one why are you being such a jerk face I can't say I don't know what you're talking about still talking really pretty I know I do their knives what is going on weed these mqp the boxes cuz not anyone did he miss downstairs