Motorola Atrix Work and Play Kit Unboxing and Review

I've just set up my Motorola Atrix "Work and Play" Dock otherwise known as the Multimedia Dock. It has a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, remote, a mini HDMI port, and 3 USB ports on the rear, and is powered by an 18W PSU. See more photos here.

It all feels very well built, the Bluetooth keyboard reminds me of the Apple wireless keyboards, chiclet keys, and similar weight and feel. It was all very well packed in it's box too. The dock has a solid feel to it too, nicely weighted and rubber pads for gripping a smooth table. The keyboard takes 2x AA batteries and the mouse takes 2x AAAs both provided. The little remote takes a Bios-type CR2032.

I found the Entertainment Centre to be pretty smooth. Press space on the keyboard and it plays your music while you browse your photos. Videos on the phone play perfectly too. You can advance photos on using the remote, cursor keys on the keyboard or the left-hand on-screen controls on the phone. The right-hand controls are for the music playing and volume control.

As music tracks advance there's a Notify-style pop-up and notification pop-ups also appear for new texts etc.

Next up I switched to the Webtop mode, you can switch from one to the other quite easily. In this mode the phone will display a clock instead of media controls. An on-screen version of the phone's interface appears on the desktop, which can be fullscreened too, which I put to good use with Mupen64 N64 emulator for a bit of Goldeneye! The desktop itself is based on a very lightweight bare-bones version of Ubuntu. Also I notice in WebTop mode, the screen of the phone itself can be used as a trackpad with onscreen mouse buttons.

The default browser in Webtop mode is Firefox and is completely unlinked and separate to the phone's browser. However, since I have Firefox installed on my phone I'm using Firefox Sync between the too, very handy. I also installed Adblock pop up blocker in the Webtop Firefox though for some reason the normal Adblock Plus isn't available.

Overall I'm really pleased with the Work and Play Kit, it's very handy for quickly showing my photos and videos on a big screen, it also seems to be quite well made too and the whole kit should be useful when I need to travel light. Although the kit is a year old I think it's still a very useful tool and as it's been replaced is much cheaper than it was new! I'll see how I get on with this, and next I'd like to get the Lapdock!

720p Video Recordings Using My Motorola Atrix

I recorded a some videos of the 'Rockin The Park' classic rock event at Clumber Park on Friday night, using my Motorola Atrix and I'm very impressed with the video and particularly the sound quality. Here's a couple of them:

From HTC Hero to Motorola Atrix

I've just upgraded from my HTC Hero to a Motorola Atrix. It's second hand but is in very good condition, and the 4.0-inch 960×540 screen is beautiful! The only sign of previous wear are some very tiny scuff marks on the battery cover.

The Atrix is quite a leap in performance from my HTC Hero! It has a 1Ghz dual core Nvidia Tegra 2 CPU, 1GB of RAM, 16GB internal storage and a microSD card slot that supports up to a 64GB card, though i have a 32GB card that I was using in my Hero. All of this means it can run plenty of apps including some reasonable games.  I can now finally watch and record (720p) HD video and do other stuff much quicker than before. I know that many of you probably have fairly decent phones and this is normal to you but for me it's a new and awesome experience!

The Atrix runs Android Gingerbread has quite a few Motorola specific apps and widgets installed. One thing I do like is the Social app that's useful for Facebook since I don't want the awful official app installed. I wasn't keen on the original launcher so I replaced it with my favourite, Zeam which I'm used to from using it on my Hero. I used to run Beautiful Widgets on my Hero but it doesn't seem to be compatible with my Atrix so I scouted round for an alternative and found Sense Analog Clock Dark which works nicely and fits well with the default theme and wallpaper I found in the stock list of backgrounds. It can show system info and also weather, but I prefer to use the Weather widget that's preinstalled. I'm also using the handy Power Widget Lite to turn on/off wifi, bluetooth etc. Firefox is now my default browser, it works well and the sync feature is very useful. Here's a screenshot of all my workspaces:

The Atrix's rear camera does 5mp stills and up to 720P video, with a firmware upgrade it will do 1080p. I'm very impressed with the quality of the video and audio recording. It also sounds reasonable coming from the speaker(s?), I was watching a YouTube video earlier that definitely seemed to have reasonable bass to it, and sounded a lot better than the awful speaker on my Dell D430! It also has a reasonable front facing VGA camera for video calls which works well with Google+ Hangouts. I like the way in Hangouts you can switch to the rear facing camera with just a finger tap. 

Here's a photo I took earlier it was a nice sunny day:

The only thing I don't like about the Atrix is it seems to take a very long time to charge the battery, not helped by my urge to pick it up every 5 minutes! I think various apps and background processes are probably chewing up the power too while I'm not using it. It's quicker to charge if I just turn it off.  Also it arrived with an awful third-party PSU that was only 500mA, which also seemed to produce a jittery effect with the screen when the battery was very low while. Fortunately the cheap charging dock I ordered came with a decent 1000mA PSU with USB socket and cable so I'm using that. I also bought a nice and cheap wallet-style soft case which gives it a little protection, though it's slightly annoying having to remove it to put it in a dock. I'm also considering buying a new high capacity battery since they are very cheap on E-bay (£6-10)

One thing I really like is the power button that also doubles as a finger print reader so you can unlock just by swiping your finger which, with practice, I've found to be quicker than tapping in a code or pattern.

This brings to me to my favourite feature of the Atrix, the ability to connect it via the multimedia docking station to a HDMI input on a TV or monitor and use a USB mouse and keyboard to use it like a PC. Even better is the Lapdock or laptop dock that turns it into a lightweight laptop. Arstechnica did a good review of the web-top type experience with the Atrix and Lapdock so I don't need to go through it too much here but when I can afford it I'd definitely like both of these accessories! 

I've also rooted the Atrix using Pete's Motorola Tools which makes it relatively painless experience. Although I'm tempted to install CyanogenMod on it, I'm not sure absolutely everything works with CM installed, and apparently it will get an official ICS upgrade soon. Anyway, it's great to finally have a phone that only came out last year, that's fairly powerful and should hopefully last me awhile.

Linux on Film: Ubuntu on a Macbook with Xbox Kinect in a hospital operating room

Linux on Film: Ubuntu on a Macbook with Xbox Kinect in a hospital operating room via my other blog :)

Upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04

I recently upgraded several PCs to Ubuntu 12.04, either from 11.10 or from 10.04. Most upgrades went just fine apart from one, on the Dell Latitude D505 which for some reason didn't download half the updates and had to do a sudo apt-get upgrade afterwards to get them all installed. It is apparently not recommended to upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 until 12.04.1, though I had no problems doing so on one PC I tried. On my main desktop I did have to change my Gtk theme to Adwaita since the theme I was using (Ambiance Blue) has not been updated to work with 12.04 yet, and is simple to switch using Ubuntu Tweak.

12.04 just feels like a slightly more polished version of 11.10, but this might be because I don't use Unity, which apparently has had a lot of improvements. I did try it again briefly and it's good that there's now an option to have the dock on each monitor or not in a multi-monitor setup. However I still prefer to have a dock (I use Cairo Dock) on the right hand side of my right-hand monitor, which isn't possible with Unity, so I use Gnome Classic which is, thankfully, still available in 12.04. Also Unity would be far better without the annoying Global Menus, which are not conducive to multi-tasking for me, and I don't want everything to full screen all the time.

I also tried the standard Gnome desktop, it is slightly better than Unity in some ways, apart from it needs decent hardware acceleration and the virtual desktops don't work properly on dual monitors (switching only works on main monitor). It also seems it needs more tweaking than Classic to get it how I would want it and in Gnome I miss my wobbly windows! The only thing I like about Gnome Shell and Unity is both have a good search function, it's easy to search for apps and files, other than that they both miss the mark for me. The search function in nautilus is fine for searching for files for me at the moment.

Overall, 12.04 brings quite a few other improvements over 11.10 such as better battery life, the new Privacy Manager feature in System Settings, and many others. In fresh installs, Tomboy has been removed (I've recently switched to using Evernote instead so I probably won't install it on fresh installs), and Rhythmbox has replaced Banshee as default music player. This does not bother me since I mainly use Gmusicbrowser which is far quicker and lighter than either of those, it scans my large mp3 collection in no time at all, unlike Banshee and Rhythmbox which seem to take hours! Ubuntu 12.04 is a solid LTS release, and well worth upgrading to, though I (and Canonical) would recommend waiting until 12.01.1 to upgrade PCs running the previous LTS, 10.04, or consider fresh install if you cannot wait!

Ubuntu 11.10 On Dell Latitude XT (video)

I recorded a little demo video of Ubuntu 11.10 64bit running on my XT tablet/laptop, showing Google Earth, Fennec (Firefox Mobile) browser, drawing in GIMP using the stylus, and Nautilus showing Compiz' wobbly windows effect. I used a Trust webcam hooked up to my Ubuntu desktop and recorded using Cheese which can be found in Ubuntu's repositories. Blogger won't let me embed the video so here's the Google+ link.

Gnome Classic - My Perfect Desktop (For now!)

I am at peace again in the Linux world, at least for now, I'm quite happy with the Gnome Classic desktop on Ubuntu, and finding it smoother and better looking than XFCE, but without the clusterfuck of Unity or Gnome3. I really have tried to like them, I've given them every chance but they both seem to be about reducing what I can do at the same time, this might be fine on a tiny netbook or tablet but not on the desktop. When I use them I feel like I have one hand tied behind my back. I've even tried Unity on a tablet and for a brief time it was OK, it still didn't feel right. it doesn't help that they both require decent graphics acceleration to get the most out of them, and the Global Menus of Unity are infuriating!

Gnome Classic does take a little tinkering to get it just right in 11.10 but not as much as other desktops, and it's worth the little effort required. There's a good page on AskUbuntu on how to get things working nicely, the main thing is switching the default tray applet out and adding the full Indicator Applet and reducing the size of the top panel. Also you might like to get Alt + F2 run dialogue back too. I hope Canonical keep Gnome Classic available for as long as possible, or at least until XFCE switches to GTK3. Here's how my main dual monitor desktop looks: