SiliconBeat

Motorola Atrix

I reviewed Motorola’s Atrix smartphone in this week’s Tech Files column. What intrigued me about the Atrix are its accessories: one optional dock allows the device to turn into a quasi-laptop; another allows it to turn into a pseudo desktop PC or even an Internet-connected set-top box.

As I wrote in the review, I liked the Atrix and thought the idea of a dockable smartphone had a lot of potential. But I found the docks themselves expensive, underwhelming and their potential largely unrealized.

Since I wrote my column, a reader alerted me to another reason to dislike the docks.

One of the advantages of the docks is that with them, you can use a full version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser to surf the Web and pull up Web apps in much the same way you would on a standard PC. What I didn’t realize was that in order to use the full Firefox browser on AT&T’s data network, AT&T requires users to pay its extra $20 a month tethering fee. (H/T here to blog site These Are the Droids.)

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SlingPlayer for the iPhone

The problem with Sling Media’s new new iPhone application has nothing to do with the fact that it’s running on the iPhone, an AT&T spokesman, responding to the controversy over the new program, told me today.

Sling today released its long awaited iPhone application, which allows users to stream live television signals to the iconic smartphone. But unlike beta versions of the program, the final release is critically hobbled by the fact that it can’t use AT&T’s 3G network. Instead, it can only access the signals over WiFi networks.

Company spokesman Mark Siegel explained to me this afternoon that AT&T considers the streaming of television signals to any device over its wireless data network to be a violation of its terms of service.

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AT&T was excoriated earlier this month by the technorati attending the South By Southwest conference in Austin. It seems with all the geeks attending the confab with their iPhones, the carrier’s network was overloaded. Attendees reportedly couldn’t access the Web, send text messages or even place phone calls.

The giant carrier did address the problems — two days after the conference started — by turning up the bandwidth on its existing towers.

One might think that the company would learn its lesson; i.e., a critical mass of geeks in one area at one time yields network overload. But apparently not.

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