Okay, so I've had this Motorola Atrix 4G smart phone for a couple of weeks now and all I can say is I'm glad I only paid a penny for it. Yeah, it's a cool gadget and all, but I'm on my laptops so much I really find its computing function to be superfluous.
When the late Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone and with it the era of the touch screen smart phone, he characterized it as three new devices in one: a new iPod with a touch screen, a phone, and a mobile computing device. That's a pretty fair assessment of not only the iPhone's functionality but that of every touch screen smart phone out there, regardless of manufacturer or operating system. So let's see how the Atrix stacks up in these three areas:
Music player--To be honest, I really haven't yet had the opportunity to do much testing in this area. There was one mp3 file on the 512 megabyte micro SD card that I transferred over from the RAZR and that played just fine. I just bought a 32 gigabyte card online, so I'm looking to do a bit more testing when it arrives. Since I have Macs and a Linux laptop, the only way to get music onto the phone seems to be download it over the Internet on the phone itself or plug the micro SD card into a USB adapter and copy files over from my computer as if it were a flash drive. That's simple enough except for having to remove and replace the fingernail-sized memory card.
Phone--As I mentioned before, the sound quality on the Atrix is every bit as good as that of the RAZR, but there are two areas where it doesn't stack up so well. First is the user interface. Making and answering calls is simply a more complex task. I miss being able to answer the phone with the Captain Kirk 'whip-n-flip' maneuver--whipping out the phone and flipping open the cover with one hand in a single, fluid motion and hanging up simply by flipping the phone closed again, also with one hand. On the Atrix--or any smart phone for that matter--it's a two-handed, multi-step operation. This burying of the phone function is yet further reinforcement of the idea that a smart phone is not primarily a voice communication device but a mobile computing device, a touch-screen PDA with integrated telephony.
So how does it stack up as a computing device? For me, it's not that great. I went through a PDA phase back in the early 2000s with a couple of Palm devices and a PocketPC device and right now, I'm feeling a great sense of deja vu. It's a neat gadget, and it's pretty cool to be able to check my e-mail or Google something while I'm in the grocery store or wherever, but at the end of the day, it has little real utility for me. As I said earlier, I'm at my computers for so much of any given day that adding an additional means of data access just isn't a life changer for me. But then again, maybe I just haven't found that killer app yet. For now, when it comes to computing, I'll just stick to my computers.
One final note is on battery life, which seems to be a real problem for many smart phones. When I'm teaching, especially afternoon and evening classes, I see students scrambling for seats closest to the walls so they can plug in their smart phones to charge them. I have been pleasantly surprised to find that is not the case with my Atrix. Granted, it's not as good as the RAZR, but it's definitely acceptable. While I could go two or three days between charges on the RAZR, unless I had a marathon phone conversation, the Atrix's battery lasts between one and two days.
I have invested in a second battery and an external cradle charger for the Atrix, as I did for the RAZR. This allows me to have a fully charged battery ready to go whenever the one in the phone becomes depleted. Charging time is only a few hours, so the odds of having both batteries drained at once are pretty slim. This is something I would not be able to do with an iPhone, which has a sealed case.
So, do I regret replacing my trusty, if aging, RAZR with a newfangled smartphone? Not really. I needed to learn about touch screens and such, and I'm sure I'll occasionally find a use for some of the phone's advanced functions, but it really isn't a life changer, nor did I expect it to be. The interesting thing is that while I no longer find myself envious of folks with smart phones, I still don't understand why they're such a big deal.
Once again, Mr. Spock's parting words to his rival, Stonn, in the Star Trek episode "Amok Time" ring true: "After a time, you may find that to have is not nearly so great a thing as to want."
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