It’s a Phone, It’s a Laptop, It’s an Atrix

f there has been a muted response to what is arguably the most powerful mobile phone currently made – the Atrix – it may be due to its parentage. The phone comes from Motorola.

The once-mighty Motorola dominated the mobile phone market quarter after quarter with products like the reliable and stylish Razr, but was knocked off its pedestal by the iPhone.

Motorola went on to put out some lackluster phones, started to make headway with its chunky Droid phones, and now makes a bid for the spotlight with what it calls the first dual processor phone, incorporating two 1-gigahertz processors, compared with the single 1-gigahertz processor in some of the fastest current phones.

Hand it to Motorola. The Atrix is impressive.

It is fast and fancy. A fingerprint scanner built into the power button protects your privacy. When set, it requires a swipe of the owner’s digit to unlock the phone. But don’t worry, there is a pin-number backup in case you leave your phone at home and need someone else to unlock it and look something up.

The phone also comes with Motorblur, which funnels your social media to one screen, backs up to the cloud and lets you wipe your phone’s memory remotely if it’s stolen.

Its biggest trick, though, is that it plugs into a 11.6-inch screen and keyboard device to become a mini laptop that is just 14 millimeters thick — about the same as an iPhone with a bumper. The keyboard has its own power source so as not to sap the phone and is rated at up to eight hours use. The laptop has USB slots so you can use an external drive. You’ll want to; the phone has 16 gigabytes of internal storage and 32 gigabytes can be added through a MicroSD card.

The phone’s dual-processor runs the laptop and you can still make a call while using the computer. The Atrix has 1 gigabyte of RAM, again twice that of most current phones, so it should multitask smoothly. And downloads will be speedy if you are on the 4G network.

The phone also has a front-facing VGA camera and a rear-facing 5 megapixel still and video camera, which can shoot in high definition. The screen, which Motorola is calls “Quarter High Definition,” meaning 960 X 540 pixels, is easy to read but not startling.

The big question will be the battery life. The operating system is Android 2.2, which does a better job of managing battery power than earlier Android operating systems, but there are still two processors.

Motorola said that to conserve the battery the phone will use only one processor when only one is needed. But what happens if it uses less battery to have two processors working at half power than a single processor at full power?

I guess we’ll find out when we find out the price, which has not been announced. The Atrix will be out in the first quarter at AT&T, but there is no fear of a repeat of the iPhone’s exclusivity. A dual core phone, the Bionic, will go to Verizon.