AT&T / Motorola Update Atrix 4G To Powerhouse Phone

The original version of the Artix 4G for AT&T promised a lot but somehow didn’t always deliver. Despite being the first dual-core Android phone and the revolutionary laptop docking station that allowed the Atrix to transform into full laptop computer, the Atrix was easy to like but hard to love.

That’s changed with the Android 2.3 / Gingerbread update for the Atrix. We can finally see this powerhouse phone unleashed. And it’s quite a package.

Let’s start by saying, to their credit, since its release Motorola and AT&T have steadily released update after update to fix bugs and bring better performance to the Atrix. The touchscreen and fingerprint reader, Bluetooth, battery life and many other features been improved dramatically since this phone launched.

Now, with the latest OS upgrade to Android 2.3 Atrrix users are getting a number of important and welcome new features. To begin with, it’s now possible to load apps from “unknown sources” like the Amazon App store or Gameloft. That means a much wider choice of apps available for the Atrix 4G.

Aside from a UI makeover giving a cleaner home screen, new dock icons and a better app tray with grouping, Motorola have also improved the photo gallery so that images from your friends and family spread across different social networks like Facebook and Picasa are now aggregated in one place. Music discovery is now an option with the music player giving users access to personalized track recommendations, videos and other artist news and information.

Other improvements include much faster web browsing via the Webtop docking station and new location-based recommendations through Facebook and Yelp. Less visible improvements include better phone security with device encryption, SD card encryption and support for remote management and remote wipe – handy for removing sensitive, or all, data from a phone after it’s gone missing or is stolen.

All in all these changes make the Atrix 4G almost seem like a new phone – especially since the lag early users complained about is now completely gone. The performance boost from this update is significant. The Atrix is now an equal to other more recent Motorola 4G phones like the Photon 4G for Sprint.

For our money, the best 4G phone on AT&T is undoubtedly the Artix 4G.