I've had my Atrix 2 for a few days and am already getting buyers remorse. I?ve seen to have misjudged the tradeoffs and a lot of the pros seem trifling to me compared to the cons. There's a lot more negatives here than positives so if you don't wanna read my negatives you should skip this post. I've been poking around the forum here and really just went by assumptions on what I've read and such, but reality is usually never as rosy as my imagination. I draw up a complaint list for all my phones and am not phone or brand loyal, just how I see it. Hopefully it will help other nitpickers in deciding.
For starters, the display looks cheap. When turned off, its like a super thick gloss or plastic (old resistive PDAs or very low-end laptops with fishbowl gloss screens come to mind) that also can reflect light like the cheap plastic mirrors you buy at Target. In fact, it works great as a kind of dingy mirror. Samsung phones are very black, and I don't remember other brands being so thick and plasticky and reflective looking. The resistive look also extends to the feel of the touchscreen. It is soft and can be pushed inward, like a resistive screen, with the lightest tap. I don't think this is glass at all, most likely some sort of plastic. Swiping is not smooth. Feels like swiping on plastic, with some resistance. Is it plastic or is it glass? I dunno. It has a plastic consistency. I'd read a couple of times of the screen possibly being plastic, from some rather unreliable sources (bad English in the comments section of some blog) but sometimes those end up being right, and it would have definitely swayed my decision making if I knew about it.
I thought the display would be on par with Super LCD except for the viewing angles, even though I always felt disappointed when seeing the display on youtube videos. Turns out the youtube videos were right. It is pretty dull compared to Super LCD. Compared to Super LCDs on HTC phones, the colors lacked punch and the contrast was a big step down. Viewing angles also were low enough to be a big bother. Solid colors, especially white, would bring it out the most as there is a slight negative haze on the screen that makes it feel very low quality. The colors don?t go all negative at off-angles like really cheap TN-film displays, but the negative haze is there. SuperLCD, IPS and AMOLED don't do this. Everything is exacerbated by the plastic layer on top, which is translucent, thick, and very visible. Blacks are already not the strong point of LCDs, but the light caught in the far-from-transparent plastic makes it look even grayer.
Performance is also kind of underwhelming. It doesn?t seem any faster than a single-core phone. The touchscreen doesn?t seem responsive. I have to tap multiple times on the bottom keys to trigger them or in some cases a prolonged hard press. Swiping isn?t very responsive, the plastic feel of the touchscreen and the resistance that comes with it not helping. Opening and leaving apps seems to lag or pause a bit before the animation triggers. Web pages load quickly, but swiping or pinch-to-zoom is nonresponsive at times and will trigger seconds later or not at all. When it does scroll, its not smooth. Then there?s the general bland off-white interface and for some reason, really low-fi shuffling sound they use for taps. I thought the Samsung popping noise was annoying. This is annoying in a whole different, more aggravating way. This is accompanied by the haptic feedback, which feels and sounds very strange, in a disquieting way.
I?ll have to stem some of this negativity by saying the phone has a very good sounding speaker for a 10mm phone. The GPS is also fast and no problems with wifi or calls.
The phone feels very solid, but a bit too heavy and dense. Turns out I'm more for solid build and no moving parts and not for more weight. Since the back is flat and the sides don?t taper to the back much, my fingers don?t even make contact with the back and much of the support is on the sides, and it feels like it might slip out because of the weight. Its strange that the Samsung Infuse which isn't that different dimension-wise, can feel so much lighter even though there's only 8 grams separating them.
Camera focus is very hit or miss. Sometimes it will take 1/100 of a second to snap a blurry picture and sometimes it will take 5 seconds squinting about with very conspicuous mechanical sounds until it thinks it has the right focus, and finally snaps, longer if the flash needs to be engaged. Colors are bland, details can be poor or non-existent. Videos are smooth with great auto-exposure and the audio capture is probably the best I?ve heard from a phone, but the details are lacking or non-existent and the image is soft. It?s more VGA than FullHD. Noise is really bad when indoors. When going through a semi-dark hallway the video turns super choppy and noisy until when you enter a room and then it oddly becomes buttery smooth again, with lots of fast moving noise to show that smoothness.
And yeah, the buttons kind of suck. You can?t feel the power button since its flush and not textured differently. You just have to push in the general top right and hope it hits. I find the Samsung power key which is on the right and always falls where my index finger is to be way better. The volume keys are also thin and hard to push as well as the camera key. The on-screen shutter key is much easier and the phone more secure since my fingers wrap behind the phone. If I used the camera key I?d have to hold it by the corners in a precarious position and push down hard.
Most things function and function well, but a lot of the details get glossed over, and it?s the details that define a premium handset. This does feel more like a budget phone to match the budget price. It can do everything the high-end phones can, just not as well as I hoped it would. In the end, I?m really just griping over the fact that for maybe $80 more I could?ve gotten the T-mobile Samsung GS2. I would probably write just as long a complaint list, but then there wouldn?t be a better phone to upgrade to and I?d at least be stuck with a smartphone for more than a couple months.