Motorola Atrix Cell Phone Review

Setup and Operating System

To setup the Atrix, you must have a Motoblur account with Motorola. If you don’t have one, you can set one up right from the phone. Motoblur has a lot of social network support. You can add as many accounts as you like and it will sync your contacts, posts, feeds, messages, emails, and photos, from sources like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, email, Picasa, and Photobucket. After you add a social networking account to Motoblur, you can see and respond to friends’ updates with a Social Networking widget. Motorola’s overlay does an excellent job of making it easy to keep up with your friends and social network sites on your phone.

After you set up your Motoblur account, you will want to set up your email. The Atrix supports POP3 and IMAP accounts, Gmail, corporate email, and corporate directory lookup.

Our review Atrix came with Android 2.2.1 (Froyo) installed. We knew that Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread) was a big improvement, so our first task was to upgrade the operating system. We had to go through the upgrade process and reboot of the phone four times before Android 2.3.4 was actually installed. The first three upgrades downloaded and upgraded other software components. There were no alerts that notified us of this. We simply saw that another update was available and clicked to install it. Although this was a bit time consuming (best done over Wi-Fi), it was a seamless process.

Once Gingerbread was installed, we noticed immediate improvement. This newer operating system version offers a more refined interface, a notification shade that lets you dismiss individual notifications, redesigned shortcuts and widgets, and an improved music player. The biggest change may well be the extra four doc icons at the bottom of the screen, three of which are customizable. To show you just how different things can look between the two operating system versions, we did two screen shows. Figure 9 shows the home page under Froyo. Figure 10 shows the same page after Gingerbread was installed.

Figure 9: The Froyo home page

Figure 10: The Gingerbread home page