The Atrix 4G , where the smartphone with its dock had pride of place. The concept is that the smartphone is now the powerhouse and other elements - screen, keyboard, remote speakers and mouse - are subservient to it. The Atrix 4G dominates the screen that acts as its docking station so much that the attractive ultraportable display is known only in direct reference to it.
The smartphone pushes content out to and flits nimbly between them, automatically resuming on one device where it last left off on the last, including displaying the last viewing web page or photo in an album. We don't just mean from screen to screen either. You can move seamlessly from Atrix to Xoom to another connected device without missing a beat. And it's the Atrix, rather than the tablet, that Motorola says is key here. The device will have its own accessories in the form of a speaker dock for entertainment - ARM's James Bruce is already foretelling an aftermarket of third-party speaker makers leaping in here to build compatible docks.
If the smartphone really is today's computer - a mantra Nokia has been chanting for at least three years and that Motorola and others also adhere to - it seems strange to hide it behind a screen.
As well as having 4G connectivity - with Verizon putting 4G LTE networks in the major US cities this year, mobile broadband is about a huge jolt of extra power - the Atrix has as much memory as its tablet companion. The 16GB already onboard can be further boosted by the insertion of a 32GB SD Card, taking it to a mighty 48GB overall. If Nand flash memory can be used to augment the virtual memory, as it can on Windows laptops, this could be an interesting statement.
The Motorola Atrix 4G has 1GB of nVidia Tegra 2 dual-core processing power at its disposal, touts a 4in screen 960x540-pixels dense and has a MotoBlur overlay for direct access to Facebook, email , SMS and social media. Access to the device can be fingerprint recognition-controlled or use a PIN code (as per the Xoom). At launch, rumoured to be as soon as next week in the US, the Motorola Atrix 4G will run Android 2.2 Froyo.