Motorola Atrix HD LTE – Hands On Review [video]

So I got this nice little bad boy, and couldn’t wait to review it…

But let’s have Bell tell you a little about the phone first. Give you a precursor to my thoughts.

Here’s their video (for some reason it’s not embedding)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPQQeb7DUKY

The new MOTOROLA ATRIX™ HD LTE is now available at Bell Mobility. This Android-powered smartphone is sure to turn heads with a 4.5-inch ColourBoost™ display – the highest resolution smartphone display on the market supporting a wide range of more vibrant colours. More pixels mean greater detail and crisper, clearer images that look true to life – whether you’re viewing exclusive Bell Mobile TV content or movies downloaded from Google Play™. And because you need enough power to fuel everything you demand of your smartphone, ATRIX HD LTE is powered by a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor compatible with Bell’s world-leading 4G LTE network.

Proving it’s more than just a pretty face, MOTOROLA ATRIX HD LTE comes with SMARTACTIONS™, a free app that extends your battery life and automates everyday tasks so you’ll spend less time worrying about your battery and more time having fun.

MOTOROLA ATRIX HD LTE is available at Bell for as little as $49.95 on a three year commitment (special back to school, limited time only offer) or $599.95 outright. For more information, visit Motorola.ca/ATRIXHDor Bell.ca/MotoATRIXHDLTE.

Specs

4.5″ 1280×720 with ColourBoost™ & Gorilla Glass
1.5GHz dual core KRAITS processor
1GB RAM
8GB storage (5GB usable)
8MP Camera / 1.3MP
1780mAh battery

Outside

HDMI(mini) and microUSB… assumably for dock interface + headphone all at top
no accessible battery
nice ‘kevlar’ back
huge looking ff camera
Gorilla glass
speaker at the top – and it’s loud!
big ‘chin’, and notification light is at top
microSD/SIM slot

Inside

ICS 4.0.4 + Motoblur LiveWidgets
very close to vanilla/stock Android
VERY close

Usage

[I had some benchmarks, but somehow the screenshots got lost… sorry]

You start out feeling like this thing is pretty big. Then again it is larger than the Nexus (thicker than the RAZR, thinner than the RAZR MAXX).

Turning it you get to see a nice lock screen – a blend of Motoblur and ICS, but ever so subtly skinned. It’s as close to being a true ‘stock device’ without being stock. You’ll see this in the way that all the icons look. It even has the JellyBean feel of how it reorganizes a screen with widgets and icons as you move them about.

Speaking of widgets / screen icons. There’s only really one widget it’s added, the circles. And they have a neat ‘swipable’ feature. And speaking of ‘swipable’ features, several of the core apps not only have widgets, but their icons themselves are set up that you can swipe up and bring a ‘hovering widget’. Very neat, very cool.

Performance wise, it really handles itself well. Playing some of the 3rd person shooter games or others doesn’t slow it down noticeably. Maybe a little, but not much at all. While playing the games the loud speaker does what it says and is quite loud enough. I had to turn it down quite a bit to a ‘normal’ level.

It has a good battery life, no complaints there, despite it being a rather smaller battery. Then again, I never tested it with LTE on. But battery life is made even longer with the usage of “SmartActions”, it’ll even prompt you to turn on a suggested action if it thinks it might help. It’s pretty intelligent.

I briefly looked over SmartActions, and I’ve seen it in a few of the other Motorola devices, but this time it really looks like they’ve thought it through and made it simpler to use.

Last but not least, I’ll say it — I love the soft buttons! Nothing like that STOCK FEEL.

Camera

Decent – no complaints with quality (there’s one that’s pretty ‘noisy’ however, with indoor lighting)

I can only wish that it had an HDR setting.

As for video there’s some cool modes (see in the minus folder above for some timelapse videos). Also, I made an HD video with it reviewing the fantom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zENvDmBPSFg

Other miscellanea

Flick up icons are not only cool to have the widget, they also notify you of the number of unread notifications

When you reach the end of the home screens it’ll give you an option for a new screen, either blank or with ‘templates’

Unfortunately the cool lock screen isn’t customizable.

BELL logo is is always there in the notification tray. See? Now you can’t un-see it!

Built in wireless printing option. Now that’s cool.. really it is. It just automatically picked up my Canon printer at home and I easily sent photos to it. Never had I had anything that easy? Even with the specific Canon wireless printing app for that printer.