Motorola Atrix Lapdock

» see motorola.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the atrix lapdock was an at&t exclusive in the us. it never had a turkish carrier launch. by 2011 i was on an android phone in ankara, the kind of buyer who would read every review of the atrix 4g and the lapdock, but the dock was not something you could walk into a turkcell store and buy. roughly.

the lapdock was motorola's bet that a smartphone could be the brain of a laptop. you took the atrix 4g, slid it into a port on the back of a thin clamshell with no cpu of its own. the lapdock then ran webtop, an ubuntu-based desktop with firefox and a handful of productivity apps mapped against the phone's storage. the screen was eleven inches and the dock carried its own battery, the phone kept its own life on the side.

it launched on at&t on 22 february 2011 alongside the atrix 4g. price was $499 for the dock alone, more than a netbook of the same size. motorola won cnet's best of ces 2011 for the smartphone bundle. either way, the tech press wrote heavy review pieces and started comparing the concept to the palm foleo from 2007 (the foleo had been canceled before launch).

~ the dossier ~

~ what really happened ~

by mid 2012 the lapdock price had been cut down to about $200 in clearance. the motorola atrix hd shipped in july 2012 without webtop support, without lapdock compatibility. motorola told reviewers the omission was about holding the phone at the $99 at&t price point.

the public end came in october 2012. honestly, motorola told the verge and androidpolice that adoption had not been strong enough to keep webtop alive on future phones. the photon q 4g lte and the droid razr m onward dropped it. close enough, the lapdock died with the software it depended on.

~ what got buried with it ~

the phone-as-laptop pitch did not die with the lapdock, but the consumer-priced form of it did. samsung dex turned up in 2017 with a desktop-from-phone dock for the galaxy s8. the windows continuum experiment with the lumia 950 went the same way. the lapdock at $499 with webtop in 2011 had been three years early and one carrier short.

the leftover hardware ended up cheap on ebay. raspberry pi hobbyists bought the orphan docks for fifty dollars to run a pi inside the clamshell, which kept the lapdock alive as a maker prop for another decade past the death of webtop itself.

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