Motorola has just launched the Motorola Lapdock 100, a laptop dock that will work with every current -and future- Webtop-enabled smartphones. If you haven’t heard of Webtop before, it’s a proprietary Motorola “computer mode” that Motorola smartphone can go into when they are connected to a TV or a Lapdock. The phone then turns into a mini Linux laptop with a full desktop browser etc. We mentioned this feature in our recent Motorola Photon 4G Review and in our original Motorola Atrix Review.This move shows that Motorola has listened to critics (like us) who said that having one lapdock for each phone is kinda dumb and that it was preventing the company from ever reaching any sort of economies of scale.
But the change also has one apparent downside: to accommodate every phone design, the Lapdock appears to be chubbier than its predecessors, but it weighs “only” 2.2Lbs. I recommend reading the Atrix review to have a feel for what the Lapdock is capable of in the real world, but to make a long story short, we love the concept, but the current smartphones are not fast enough to replace a small laptop.
Finally, there is the matter of pricing. Right now, the price of the Lapdock 100 is unknown, but we hope that it will be lower than the previous dock which were priced at $500. From what we have heard on the streets, a $200 price would gain wider acceptance. If not, Motorola has one more solution: open or license its design to 3rd party hardware vendors who can build cheaper lapdocks… [Motorola Lapdock 100]
Update 10/12: the MSRP has been set at $249 by Motorola
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