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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