Motorola Atrix: Smartphone or laptop? You decide.

The dust from the 2011 CES is still settling, but one thing is for sure – the Motorola Atrix, a next-generation smartphone set for release in the first quarter of this year, has kicked up the lion's share of conference buzz. And why not? After all, the Atrix isn't just any smartphone. Instead, the device works a little like a Transformer: When partnered with the Atrix "laptop dock," the Android-powered Atrix turns into a netbook.

Theoretically, that means that in the future, consumers could opt for just an Atrix and a laptop dock, instead of a smartphone and a laptop. (For more on the increasingly small distance between smartphones and laptops, check out this 2009 piece from the Monitor.)

What Motorola has done, writes John Biggs of CrunchGear, "is offer two separate potential paths for accessing your phone in a larger format – either via HDMI or via a separate piece of hardware. This means you don’t actually have to invest in a special peripheral if you don’t want to and, once you realize you love the Atrix’s feature set, you can upgrade to the laptop dock." Or not.

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"You don’t have to use the Atrix’s most important feature," Biggs adds, "which is what makes it especially compelling."

James Kendrick of ZDNet agrees. But he points out that Motorola has yet to fully address pricing issues for the Atrix. "As is always the case with cool new gadgets the devil is in the details, namely how much the Atrix 4G will cost with the laptop dock," Kendrick writes. "As long as Motorola doesn’t price the dock too high, this may actually make it into consumers’ hands. It definitely has plenty of mobile mojo."