The comparison is undeniable and inevitable. The Compufone Smartphone, at least in concept, sounds a lot like the Motorola Atrix. It’s a smartphone, but it’s also designed to power a couple other docking devices too.

Rather than offer a Multimedia Dock like the Atrix, the Compufone has a tablet dock. Shove your smartphone in there and you get a 10-inch multi-touch tablet. Interestingly enough, the tablet comes with a Bluetooth headset, so you can keep chatting too. And again, everything is powered by the phone rather than by the dock.

To get the netbook experience, you combine the Compufone and the tablet dock with a keyboard dock. The screen from the tablet becomes the screen for your pseudo netbook.

Boasting an almost iPhone 4-esque industrial design, the Compufone itself gets a four-inch AMOLED display, Nvidia Tegra 2, 5MP camera, front-facing VGA camera, NFC, aGPS, and 16 gigs of flash memory. It’ll run on Android, but they haven’t decided on which version.

This all sounds terribly intriguing. I just hope that Kosmaz doesn’t follow Motorola’s footsteps for the accessory pricing. That, and trying to sell a device without a recognizable brand name is going to be quite the challenge. Look for the Compufone to launch in Q4.

[Read]

The post Compufone Smartphone Convertible Tablet Takes a Page from Motorola’s Atrix appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Motorola took a little bit of wind out of its own sails by letting the AT&T event reveal the Motorola Atrix 4G, but the Motorola event a few hours later let you get up close and personal with the hot new smartphone… if you could fight past the nerdgasm to get close enough, that is.

Yes, I fought. It was quite the struggle, but I did manage to get a really good look at the laptop-like dock that you can get for the upcoming smartphone. The matte black finish and super slim profile is reminiscent of that Google Chrome OS netbook going around, but you have to realize that this is just a dock; there are no real guts in this thing. The phone does all the work.

It’s actually pretty cool that the dock doesn’t have its own power button. As soon as you plunk the Atrix 4G into the dock in the back, the dock turns on and launches into a “Webtop” interface with a real Firefox web browser and other utilities. There’s a good size keyboard and trackpad, as well as a 11.6-inch LCD display.

If you take a look at the pictures, the “docking” portion in the back is a reasonable distance away from the “laptop” display, so you can tilt it back a fair amount. You’ll also notice that the dock folds right back into the whole laptop thing, making for a blade-thin portable accessory.

If you want to go even bigger, Motorola was also showing off a multimedia dock that provides a real keyboard and HDMI output to however big a display you desire. The interface is identical to the laptop-like dock with the Webtop thing. You can even multi-task in the “mobile” view on your big screen, showing off the different apps as tabs while simultaneously doing the Webtop thing in another window.

They’re not kidding. The Motorola Atrix 4G is a real game changer. Look for it through AT&T, Bell Canada, and Orange UK in the not-so-distant future.

The post Checking out the Motorola Atrix 4G laptop dock appeared first on Mobile Magazine.