The Motorola Atrix 2 has crept out from under the iPhone 4S' coattails this weekend for a mere $99 on contract. Poor Atrix 2: launched with no fanfare, unlike the first Atrix 4G, which received a mini-blast of marketing not unlike its Droid cousins on Verizon when it launched 7 months ago. That doesn't mean the Atrix 2 isn't an excellent high end Android smartphone. What's improved from the original Atrix? The Atrix 2 has a larger 4.3" qHD display and that sometimes grainy PenTile matrix is nowhere to be found. Text is easier to read on the larger display, and movies are more enjoyable too. The phone has HSPA+ 21 Mbps, and we got notably faster speeds vs. 14.4 Mbps AT&T phones like the Atrix 4G and iPhone 4S. The phone got from 5-12 megs down in Ookla's Speedtest.net app, and 1 meg up. Combine that with the mobile hotspot feature (included with 4 gig and higher data packages), and you've got something really useful here.
The Atrix 2 runs Android OS 2.3.5 Gingerbread with typical Motorola UI and software customizations that we like just fine. You get their squared off app icons and lots of account and social network integration, but the UI isn't needlessly gussied up. A 1GHz dual core TI OMAP CPU powers the phone vs. the Tegra 2 in the first Atrix, and they both benchmark at 2250-2300 in Quadrant. The Atrix 2 scores 67 in Linpack's multi-thread test, which is solid. Experientially, it feels responsive, though we noted just a hint of lag now and then that we didn't experience with our Droid Bionic running on the same CPU.
Though you lose the ability to play the small number of high quality Nvidia Tegra Zone games with the Texas Instruments CPU, the Atrix 2 is a very capable 3D gamer and I've found that it's stronger at some 2D tasks like video playback. The Atrix 2 has no problem playing 1080p high profile MPEG4 videos; a task that many 1GHz dual core Tegra 2 tablets and smartphones can't do well (and in some cases not at all).
