CES 2011 News

Motorola's getting a lot of press this morning after announcing its much-hyped competitor to the iPad, the Xoom. But the Atrix, also unveiled at Motorola's press conference yesterday, is generating quite a lot of buzz as well.

The novel idea behind the Atrix is that it's a smartphone that plugs into the shell of a laptop. Unlike the doomed Palm Foleo, which synced a computer with a Palm Treo, all the computing power in the Atrix is in the smartphone.

The phone, which Motorola is calling the "world's most powerful smartphone," has some great guts: an NVIDIA Tegra 2, four-inch display, a front-facing camera and a rear-facing 5MP camera, 11GB RAM, 16GB on-board memory, and a microSD card slot. It runs Android 2.2 FroYo.

The laptop, which is being dubbed a "webtop," has an 11.6-inch display, two USB ports and a full keyboard.

Electronista had a brief hands-on with the Atrix, and had high praise for the hardware and design, with slight misgivings about the software. Obviously, it's still early to make a call on the Atrix's performance, but Electronista noted that performance slowed down considerably when the phone was docked into the laptop shell.