[Atrix 4G General] squarejp:
My simple comparisons between Atrix and iPhone

I came from the following devices before Atrix 4G:

iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, Samsung Captivate, Samsung Focus, and now the ATRIX 4G. I still have my Captivate, Focus, and 3GS with me. iPhone 4's Bluetooth was giving me absymal call quality that I couldn't keep the stupid iPhone 4. It does have the front facing camera, and very very good picture quality at the back. The IPS screen is no Super AMOLED, but IPS colors are very accurate. The Super AMOLED has burn-in issue after several months of usage especially if you are in a Skype or phone conversation, the screen NEVER turns off when using speaker phone or bluetooth headset...... I have to click the sleep button on my captivate.... sucka SUPERAMOLED best color but worse life-span than LCDs PERIOD! I personally do not like to simply read the reviews and forums and decide what not to buy, because my first hand experience is the most important.

1. GPS: Atrix and iPhone 4 are excellent and they lock extremely fast and instant regardless of Wifi, 3G cell tower triangulation, or none! Woo hoo. I have Navigon on iPhone so I love it way more than Android's Google Nav or Navigon there coz they are buggy and the vocie synthesizer is like a sound of Stephan Hawkins without emotion. Navigon's soothing woman voice provides the best GPS Navi experience so far. Unfortunately, I can't say the same with the Navigon for Android. It's too buggy and lacking some good features from the iOS. I do like Android's 3D map and voice search and most importantly it's FREE. BUT constantly streaming maps over the cell tower is not reliable. What happen when you go to area without cell coverage? Also what happen if the data plan has only 200MB/month?

2. Internet Browsing speed/ease:

I like Safari coz of double tapping to zoom, the pintch and zoom performance and the beauty of copy and paste has been doing very well and more responsive than the Atrix. On the Atrix browser, i CANNOT edit this forum while typing this response. It sometimes not allowing me to select and scroll through the text even Atrix is imitating Apple with the magnifying glass. Sometimes the magnifying glass never shows up!!! While flash is fun on my Atrix bit it slows down a lot just to display ads. Fortunately I can disable Flash if I want to.

Flash to me while is pretty much full web browsing experience, but it does slow down the entire web page performance. It's good to have the flash option in Android no doubt. iOS however, has forced Adobe to take mobile platform more seriously and look into mobile hardware acceleration to create smooth browsing experience.

3. Stability/Speed: Pretty stable so far and pretty snappy over all. Install Launcher Pro or Go Launch Ex and also use Titanium Backup to Freeze MotoBlur if you are thinking Blur is slowing the system down....But I personally like Blur's widget just not the app drawer. Go Launcher EX has the similar UI as the iOS in the app drawer which is a plus when you want to manage your apps such as hold to wiggle the apps and delete them by touching the Minus sign like iOS.

4. Call Quality/Least dropped calls

iPhone 4 call quality is not as good except ear piece. Bluetooth and Speaker phones are.... bad..... the noise cancellation technology on iPhone 4 is not really good... People had hard time hear my voice even I have tried Jawbone Icon, Plantronics, BlueAnt all these highest end bluetooth headsets! Only the earpiece and stupid corded headphone works okay on the iPhone 4

Atrix is also suffering from similar problem especially if there is wind blowing to the top of the microphone.... the wind noise cancellation of the Atrix is not great which Motorola is trying to improve. Fortunately, BLUETOOTH headset call quality is EXCELLENT and that's what I use the most and perfect!!! Speakerphone is pretty good most of the time.

5. Speaker Quality/Volume

iPhone 4 and Atrix both housing the very loud speakers. I love iPhone 4 and Atrix

6. IPS LCD vs Pentile LCD

iPhone 4's LCD color is way more accurate compare to the Pentile LCD used in Atrix. The Color in Atrix such as yellow is greenish lime...... check the demo unit to compare. Use color calibration tables to compare. iPhone 4 is very very very good.

7. OS: ease of use vs high customizable.

I've discovered that Android is like beta product to me. People are trying hard to customize the UI just to have fun and increase productivity. iOS right now so far has provided the best experience. While Android is a little inferior due to simple Copy and Paste, delete app without accessing Application manager, update all apps at ease (Android requires manually permit each app to update automatically. Update ALL does not work when you have a modified app such as Skype for 3G call in US which cannot be updated due to relocking WiFi only call function), webpage rendering performance such as pinch to zoom in iOS is still better than Atrix running Android for sure. Android is also missing a lot of popular Games from the iOS. Hopefully Sony can do some impact....

8. Multitouch

iPhone 4: 5 points

Atrix 4G: 2 fingers but hardware could support 5 but should we buy for the potention?

Apps that support more than 2 fingers are:

iOS: Cut the Rope, Garage Band, Star Wars Force Unleashed, Street Fighter, GTA, and more

Android: does not have enough because the hardware are inconsistent. Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 can't even do multi-touch! Xperia X10 has problem when crossing X-Y axis with two fingers.

9: HDMI output

iPhone 4 or 5 can do 720P: SMOOOOOOOTH like butter but no specialized 720p interface, just mirroring your iPad2 or iPhone 4's screen to the HDTV. Good for games!!!

Atrix 720P Webtop OS is choppy It runs 720P video at lower than 15 fps....It can't truely mirror the image from the phone to the HDTV for games because for some reason the screen is forced to be a touch pad instead of a multitouch gesture or game pad control such as Samurai II.... you can only move the cursor to control the direction or the attack button but not both... VERY DISSAPOINTING!! Motorola's innovation is just old wine inside a new bottle. Webtop is more like a gimmick than a truly reliable feature.

10. VOIP: Skype, Tango, Qik, Fring, etc

iPhone 4: works all the way with Skype support video call on iOS!!!!! perfect!

Atrix 4G: Only Tango, Qik work so far recently. Skype is totally NOT working, people can't hear my voice from the mic due to high amplitude and frequencies noise. Something wrong with the codecs and non standard API that Motorola has used which is another Google's Fragmentation problem. How do you expect developers to change their source code just to suit a single device like Atrix? There is still no video call in Skype for Android!

11. Multilingual Support:

iPhone: Absolutely almost perfect. The iOS ,regardless of anywhere in the world, has the multilingual keyboard, voice recognition system, writing recognition system, system menu. It's a perfect multilingual OS that until today, there is no one in the computer industry is able to match Apple! Windows 7 still can't do that natively unless you purchase the Ultimate edition and still requires to install the language packs separately through the updates!

Atrix: Running Moto Blur is the cause for none North American languages being removed from the stock Android OS due to the limited storage space for system in the phone. Asian Language is not supported right out of the box. What's come worse is you can't even view or edit Asian language such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc in the Webtop environment! What a bummer to me! Motorola Rep told me they are interested about the application of it and willing to enable that feature. That doesn't mean they will enable the feature for North American market. It's a freaking world phone where people need to travel to conduct their business! What happen if people need to type Email in Chinese in the Webtop? It's NOT going to happen as of now and probably not unless you purchase an Asian version in the future.

12. Easy to Hack:

iPhone Jailbreaking requires careful maintanence even it's just a single-swipe or click to Jailbreak. The jailbroken device is highly unstable and usually requires a system restore which takes hours to sync back all the data if your device is fully loaded.

Atrix is easy to root (still definitely not for non tech savvy), convert your phone to webtop without buying the dock, and easy to enable Mobile Hotspot Tethering without paying. BUUUUT ENCRYPTED BOOTLOADER.... which Motorla is still deciding how to response to the developers... fortunately, there is the RSD5.0 that can flash Atrix to stock ROM now

13. BACKUP & RESTORE:

I demand not a simple cloud service backup for the contacts, email, sms, maps, search history but also for the apps and multimedia data! Motorola does provide the software to do it, but it's SLOW. The file manager transfer speed is as slow as 150 KB/sec via USB! I'm forced to use the Massive Storage Media to drag and drop contents. It's convenient in a way but it's definitely not the most efficient method. Syning data prevents wasting time to overwrite data that are up-to-date. Hopefully these can be resolved by the upcoming Gingerbread.

iOS: iTunes simple apps and data backup! It does have it's short coming such as cannot backup data of the deleted apps from the device. I repeat, data backup means not just contact, sms, over the cloud or computer but the data and settings that are stored in the apps and OS.

Atrix: Before the Gingerbread is baked for the Atrix, you must NEED to ROOT to use Titanium Backup and Rom manager (Which doesn't work coz of the locked down bootloader) and it doesn't sync to your computer or your cloud data storage centers. Why do we still use SD cards when there is Dropbox type of system? SD card backup is the not a modern solution. Morever, Titanium Backup is dangerous if you accidentally restore the incompatible data to the system file which may crash the device. The UI of Titanium is not intuitive and it's very complicated for first time users. Titanium Backup is again for geeks not your parents and definitely not your grandma! Android has completely failed in this category! Therefore it can't be a serious work phone without the right backup/restore feature. Finally Motorola's Portal is just slow.... 150KB/sec of USB transfer, it's forcing me to use as Massive Storage Device and that's 40x faster!

I do appreciate the Google cloud service to store all the search history, maps, contacts, email, etc. However, what about Apps data? I'm having a hard time to simply backup my apps data while they aren't stored somewhere in the globe.

14: Multimedia

Both iPhone and Atrix can sync with iTunes library since Apple has dominated the music market. Youtube experience is definitely a lot better in Android than iOS. Because you can rotate your Atrix in landscape mode to have full screen, while potrate mode to access related video and read/write comments while the video is playing! I would say iPhone and Atrix should be quite on par in multimedia.

Codecs that are supported by Atrix are still confusing. Some people say 720P mp4 aren't running correctly.

15. Notification System

iPhone: intrusive! Yup I don't like the bubble in the middle of the screen while I was watching movie, playing games, browsing website, VNC, and most importantly, video conferencing!

Android: non-intrusive notification system where the notifications are up on top to be slided down to review the history like a log. Perfect!

16. How data is being stored

iPhone iOS: single partition easy managemant. You don't need to keep track of where the apps are stored and whether if they can be installed to a larger sd card. This technique has been acknowledged by Microsoft's WP7 though Samsung Focus is an exception which still create confusion on which type of SD card has to be used safely. Atrix stores the data either in the internal memory or sd card which falls to the same issues as Windows Mobile installation --> confusion.

17: Email (3/14/2011)

iPhone iOS 4 now supports threaded emails which sorts out conversations with the latest at the very top even inside the conversation. So far I like it and very productive and convenient.

Atrix: The build in Email App from Motoblur does not do threaded emails. The Gmail app is even more pathetic! While the conversation feature is convenient, putting the oldest thread at the very top inside a conversation forces me to scroll all the way to the bottom just to read the latest email is just ridiculous! There is also bug for conversation list where it doesn't move to the next conversation even I've selected update automatically. The Gmail App is BROKEN in Android and people are complaining about that.

Atrix: Android's support of SD card is good but also bad when you have to keep track of where the applications are installed to and whether if they can be running efficiently when stored to the SD card. SD card does provide expandability but in reality, you are still limited by the maximum size that the device can handle which is 10GB internal usable storage + 32GB and you can't do a single partition to combine the internal storage with the SD card.

If you want a device to ease your life and improve work efficiency, get iOS. Android is more for geeks or developers. Get Atrix if you like to modify the device. The webtop is more like a gimmick rather than productivity unless you really use the Citrix Remote Desktop Control. It's an interesting idea, but in terms of daily basis, Android is still slightly behind iOS in terms of design. Market share does not reflect the re fineness of the product.

*Caution* if you have more important things to worry about rather than modifying system files, customizing the cosmetics of the UI, or simply just trying to eliminate the lags, avoid the Atrix.

Finally, I am still debating if I should keep the Atrix or wait for the iPhone 5, Galaxy S II or the Optimus 2x.