CES 2011: Ready to Trade in Your Computer for a Phone?

Motorola's Atrix 4G phone wants to be your computer, but it needs a bagful of accessories.

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CES 2011: Ready to Trade in Your Computer for a Phone?

If you’re really living in the cloud, do you need a computer? Motorola Mobility, introducing the Atrix 4G mobile phone, a stand-alone company that separated from Motorola Inc. yesterday, seems to think that the answer is no. All you need is a phone.

Well, maybe just a phone with a few accessories. At a press conference on the eve of the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Motorola piled on accessories in a way that reminded me of one of my favorite movie scenes of all time, when Steve Martin in “The Jerk” keeps adding random household objects to his list of  "the only thing I need."

Motorola started with the Atrix phone, a very nice and powerful dual core processor phone with 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage. Of course, if you’re going to do real computing with it, you need to hook it up to a few things, so you’ll need a handy dandy little dock. And a keyboard. And a big screen—a monitor, or maybe a television, so you can watch streaming HD video if you get tired of working. But that won’t fit on your lap, so you’ll need a faux-laptop (a screen, keyboard, and dock in one package).

No word yet on what it all will cost.

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