When mobile phones were first launched, who would have thought that one day, the small hand-helds would be as or more powerful than the computer, play videos like your television or serve emails to you like your laptop? The way the cellphone has transformed and taken over our lives is a marvel in itself.

As was evident at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the mobile phone is the centre of the world, and more than half of all technology coverage is around mobility – be it phones or tablets.

But, what really takes the cake is the latest offering by Motorola – the Motorola Atrix. It really stretches the boundaries of what a mobile phone can accomplish. Powered by Google Android 2.2, a dual core processor, 1GB RAM and 4G network capability, it has more firepower than some netbooks. But, the hardware is not the only differentiator – it is the way the Atrix changes its form that is most exciting, both for the individual as well as the enterprise.

Straight out of the Transformers movie, the phone can transform into a PC, a netbook or a television. Starting with netbooks, the phone can be attached to a netbook docking station – which is essentially a dumb-terminal-netbook. It is an LCD screen, track-pad, USB ports and a battery with a built-in dock for the phone. As soon as you dock the phone in, it launches its own version of bare-bones Linux. Besides other basic multimedia utilities it has a Flash enabled Firefox browser that can be used to access any of the numerous web-applications. While in this web-top view, you still have full control of the phone and can use it in a separate window on this operating system – it can be used to make calls or access applications on the phone. So, if you want to send SMS or play games on your phone while connected, you can easily do it while it is docked. And, all this is done without losing your session on the mobile phone – so if you were loading a video on the phone it will still keep loading when you dock it. And, when you un-dock it, you can still access the tabs that you had opened in the browser in the web-top view. How cool is that?

For the enterprise, it comes with a beautiful hidden surprise. This docked netbook also includes Citrix connectivity to connect to a virtual desktop on your enterprise Citrix server. So, if the user wants to do processor-intensive content creation, they can connect directly to a Microsoft Windows environment hosted on your enterprise server. Imagine the flexibility and the security options that it gives to the CIO. Now you have a device that can serve as a netbook for regular tasks or an extremely capable phone when it is not connected.

But, the Atrix is something else too – it is a mini media centre. Using another dock – called the HD dock, you can connect it to a Television or a Keyboard/ Mouse/ Monitor to convert it into a media center or a PC. While the PC has a similar interface as the netbook, the media centre gets even more interesting. As soon as you switch to this view the system that loads up on the TV shows large icons that can be viewed from a 10 ft. distance. This dock can then be operated by using an infra-red remote control that is already provided. Now, you can watch all the videos/ photos on the phone or listen to music already stored, from your couch. You can switch to the full web-top view to access the full-blown operating system. While in the web-top view on the TV, the phone can be used as a track pad with left and right buttons, and the phone’s keyboard can be used as a keyboard to type on.

Phew, isn’t that a bit much? Not really, Google the Lenovo Ideapad U1 for more hybrid goodness.

Geetaj Channana

geetaj.channana@9dot9.in