Motorola Atrix 2 review

The Motorola Atrix 2 isn't really a full sequel to the Motorola Atrix, another fast smartphone. Instead, it's an iterative release with a few new features, a better camera and a lower price. As such, the phone starts to reveal some performance issues, especially since it uses the same 1GHz dual-core processor as the first model.

The screen size is just a notch bigger - 4.3 inches compared to the original Atrix's 4-inch screen. The 960 x 540 resolution looks crisp for movies, photo galleries, web browsing and typing up text messages.

The TFT screen was responsive for finger swipes and clicks, although the screen isn't nearly as bright and clear as the Samsung Galaxy S2's AMOLED screen.

For those who tend to fire off messages every few minutes, or type longer business documents on your phone, the lack of a full hardware slide-out keyboard is only a slight detriment. For the most part, we typed fast and accurately on the Atrix's soft keyboard, even compared to a phone with a hardware keyboard.

The Motorola Atrix 2 is a 4G phone, and uses the AT&T HSPA+ network in the US. It's not an LTE phone on a second-gen network running at 10-12 Mbps. Instead, our US speed tests clocked in at only about 4Mbps on a regular basis, or sometimes as high as 6Mbps.

Running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, the Motorola Atrix 2 benefits from a few minor improvements in the latest operating system, including the ability to easily select entire passages of an email without too much effort (previous Android phones would sometimes flicker and jump around during text selection).

Another minor benefit is that you can now select whether you want to snap photos or shoot video with the VGA front-facing or rear 8MP camera and camcorder.

In an age when a $200 phone under a contract doesn't make anyone blink, the Motorola Atrix 2 is priced to sell - it costs $99 with a two-year contract in the US.

The low price makes the Motorola Atrix 2 more affordable than the iPhone 4S, the Samsung Galaxy S2 and the Galaxy Nexus. In fact, it's one of the most fairly priced high-end Android phones with a high-res camera available.

The Motorola Atrix 2 has 8GB of internal memory and supports microSD cards up to 32GB. There's 1GB of RAM, which is in line with most of the other Android models.

We won't say the phone is feature-rich in terms of hardware - it lacks an NFC chip, for example. And the latest Android models tend to use a faster 1.2GHz dual-core processor.

The phone is light, at 147g grams, and thin, at 10mm, but falters in this regard in comparison to the Samsung Galaxy S2. The S2 is much lighter, at 116g, and thinner, at 8.49mm. That makes the Motorola Atrix 2 require just a bit more heft when you want to grab it and make a call.