Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) was promising big news for the Consumer Electronics Show, and so far, the company has delivered as one of the best stock picks — announcing both the new Atrix 4G and Droid Bionic smartphones and its much-anticipated tablet project with Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) which we now know is called the Xoom (pronounced “zoom.”)
As the company’s big guns leveled against Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), the Atrix, Droid Bionic and Xoom have Motorola’s interests covered well across the spectrum of U.S. mobile carriers. The Atrix will be a flagship device for AT&T’s (NYSE:T) 4G network when it begins service later this year, while the Droid Bionic will be the first phone in the Droid line tailor-made for Verzion’s (NYSE:VZ) LTE 4G network, which began service in a limited number of U.S. cities in late 2010. Meanwhile, the Motorola Xoom is going to be the flagship tablet PC on Verizon’s 3G and 4G networks by the middle of 2011.
The Droid Bionic is very much just an evolution of the Droid X. The phone has a dual-core processor with each core at 1GHz, meaning that the phone will be able to speedily process the higher data download speeds of Verizon’s LTE network. It also has a 4.3-inch QHD screen, 1GB of RAM, and two high-quality cameras, including an 8-megapixel rear camera and a VGA camera on the front. The Droid Bionic also has a Mirror Mode for streaming video on the phone and on a television simultaneously.
The Atrix 4G for AT&T, meanwhile, is a bit more interesting. The phones shares some features with the Droid Bionic, like 1080p video output and a dual-core 1GHz processor, but the Atrix’s real selling point is its Laptop Dock accessory. Users will be able to fit the Atrix in a dock with a larger screen, keyboard, and trackpad, making the device potentially attractive for business clients that are already looking into Android-based phones as an alternative to Research In Motion’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry. The Atrix will also be the first smartphone to support a full version of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.
The Motorola Xoom tablet shares the same 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor as the Atrix. The 10.1-inch screen — slightly larger than Apple’s iPad, a change from most competitors who have opted for a smaller form factor — has a 1280 X 800 resolution. The tablet also has a 5-megapixel camera that records in 720p, and comes with a standard 32GB of onboard memory. Motorola’s press release claims the device’s battery can “support 10 hours of video,” which is comparably impressive to the iPad.
The other big news surrounding the Xoom is that the version of Google’s Android software platform running on the tablet, Honeycomb, will in fact be the next full version of the OS. Android 3.0 Honeycomb has a sleeker look than previous Android interfaces and streamlines how everything from e-books to Google’s own apps appear.
Overall, Motorola timed the announcement of its new flagship products perfectly with the company’s mobile technology’s separating into its own publicly traded entity. Apple dominated the mobile technology conversation in 2010 with the iPad — now that the tablet market is diversifying, Motorola is striking back hard, not just with its own strong looking tablet, but new smartphones with more computer-like functionality that can compete with tablets on their own.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
