Review: Motorola Atrix 4G
The Atrix 4G comes with support for multiple Exchange accounts, Gmail, POP3 and IMAP4 email from just about every vendor there is. For the most part, all it takes is a username and a password to sign up. Both Exchange and Gmail will also marry your contacts and calendar to the Atrix 4G, which is convenient.
The Gmail application is the most powerful of the email clients. It is so natively entwined with the way that Gmail works online that you hardly feel like you're using it on a phone.
The Atrix 4G has a universal inbox that collects all SMS, Twitter DMs and Facebook emails in one spot. It's a neat concept to tie together all the social networking stuff — which often arrives in the form of an SMS — with the actual SMS application. The universal inbox doesn't thread conversations from Twitter DMs together, or even Facebook emails, but it will thread normal SMS text conversations.
On the instant messaging side of the coin, Google Talk is built in. Nothing else is. If you need access to Yahoo, AIM, or Windows Live, you're going to have to search the Android Market for 'em.
There are multiple avenues into the social networking scene with the Atrix 4G. First, there are the stand-alone and dedicated Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter apps. Motoblur offers widgets for these applications, too. They are best used for posting status updates to multiple accounts at once. Motorola's home-baked software isn't as good as the dedicated apps at allowing users to interact with their friends. For instance, you can't respond to Twitter DMs from the home screen widget. You have to jump into the unified inbox to do that. If you're going to go that far, you may as well open up the regular application.
Motorola Atrix 4G
