4G at CES 2011: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile make big moves

By Chris Ziegler posted Jan 10th 2011 3:51PM

Motorola. Without a doubt, Moto was the breakout star of CES this year thanks to a four-pack of new devices—all branded 4G—that left jaws dropped across Vegas and the greater Clark County metropolitan area. The Atrix 4G for AT&T would arguably be the most interesting of those four simply because it’s the most stunningly muscular phone ever produced: on top of a 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2, it’s got 1GB of DDR2 RAM, HSPA+, a whopping 4-inch 960 x 540 display, and an integrated biometric scanner on back that doubles as a power button. Perhaps more amazingly, though, it’s compatible with desktop and laptop docks that basically turn the phone into a Linux-based PC that offers a full implementation of Firefox 3.6 along with an Android environment that can run all your mobile apps.

Though not compatible with the docks, Motorola’s other high-end Android phone here at CES—the Droid Bionic for Verizon—isn’t much less amazing. It’s got a 4.3-inch 960 x 540 display and the same dual-core processor as the Atrix, but adds LTE compatibility for Big Red’s 4G network. For T-Mobile, the Cliq 2 replacing the aging Cliq—Moto’s first Android phone, you might recall—and offers compatibility with HSPA+ paired with a 3.7-inch 854 x 480 display and a sliding landscape keyboard. It’s not high-end by any stretch, but it should slot in nicely below the G2.

Finally, Motorola became the launch partner for Google’s tablet-centric Android 3.0 Honeycomb release with its introduction of the Xoom for Verizon, a 10.1-inch tablet with a pair of 1GHz cores provided by NVIDIA. Though it won’t have 4G compatibility at its initial first quarter launch, it’ll be upgradeable to LTE in the second quarter of the year—a pretty rare show of hardware upgradeability in the industry.

Source: Engadget Mobile.