Motorola Atrix was officially launched in Malaysia yesterday and I was lucky to be there to cover the product launch and snapped some pictures and video. The smartphone is now widely available throughout Malaysia at selected retailers at a recommended retail price of RM1,999.

Motorola Atrix, running Android 2.2 Froyo OS.

Motorola chosen Malaysia as one of the first countries in Asia to launch this dual-core smartphone just five months since it was first unveiled in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2011), in Las Vegas, where it won CNET’s Best of CES “Best smartphone” award.

Andy Tan, CEO of Brightstar Distributions Sdn Bhd and Robert Van Tilburg, Senior Regional Sales Director, Motorola Mobility, South Asia posing with models at the launch of Motorola Atrix.

The claim that Motorola is calling this smartphone the world’s most powerful smartphone has raised some people’s eyebrows, but it certainly is based some supporting facts. First and foremost, Motorola Atrix is running on powerful hardware configurations and below are the key features :-

• 1GHz dual-core processor (virtually running 2 1GHz processors, good for fast games rendering & HD video playing)
• Full 1GB of RAM (good for multitasking)
• Running Android 2.2 Froyo OS (upgradable to 2.3 Gingerbread)
• 4-inch qHD (Quarter High Resolution) display, at 24-bit colour & 960×540 resolution
• Display panel is made of Corning Gorilla Glass (for maximum durability)
• 16GB on board storage space and expandable to 48GB with an optional 32GB microSD card
• Ultra thin (only 11mm) with a huge 1930mAh battery capacity (extra long battery life)
• Biometric fingerprint recognition (at the Power button) for extra security
• 5 megapixel rear camera with the ability to record HD video in 720p
• Mini-HDMI port (for direct HDMI output to external display)
• Up to 9 hours talk-time on 3G & up to 264 hours standby time on GSM!
• Supports Motorola’s revolutionary webtop application (see below for more details)

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Motorola Atrix Launched In Malaysia, Priced At RM1,999

I was invited to Nokia’s World’s Biggest Angry Birds Playground at the Boulevard Strip, Low Yat Plaza last weekend and it was totally fun to be part of the world’s record setting event.

Nokia’s World’s Biggest Angry Birds Playground

Angry Birds Playground is one of the biggest Nokia campaigns in Malaysia this year, they even invited Ville Heijari, VP Franchise Development of Rovio Mobile (the creator of Angry Birds), all the way from Finland to be part of the event. Of course we didn’t miss this golden opportunity to ask him about the latest development of Angry Birds before the event started.

Anthony Wilson, Nokia Head of Marketing Singapore, Malaysia & Brunei, and Ville Heijari, VP Franchise Development of Rovio Mobile, were taking turns to answer questions from the medias.

Anthony Wilson, Vlasta Berka (General Manager of Nokia Singapore/Malaysia & Brunei) & Ville Heijari

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Nokia’s World’s Biggest Angry Birds Playground

Today at Taiwan’s Computex trade-show 2011, ASUS has launched a new MeeGo powered netbook, Eee PC X101, that is as thin as Apple MacBook Air!

Eee PC X101 features a 10 inch screen, weighs around 950g and is only 1.76cm thick. The thickest part of a MacBook Air is 1.7cm too! Eee PC X101’s hardware details are as follows :-

• Processor: Intel Atom N435 running at 1.33 Ghz
• Display: 10.1 inch matte display at resolution 1024 x 600
• WiFi: 802.11b/g/n
• I/O: 2 x USB ports, microSD card slot, headphone / audio port
• Battery: 2600mAh

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Asus Eee PC X101 (MeeGo Netbook) As Thin As Apple MacBook Air

Today I took another video comparing iPad 2 to iPad 1 in a web browser (Safari) memory test. This memory test shows the improvement in iPad 2 in term of web browsing experience.

iPad 1 has only 256MB RAM, on the other hand iPad 2 has double amount of RAM, which is 512MB. Therefore, clearly there’s one winner in this test.

Surfing the Internet on iPad 1’s Safari web browser often will run into a reloading problem when switching tabs. Most of the time, a previously visited webpage will need to be reloaded when we are switching tabs back and forth because iPad 1 has to refresh the content of the webpage when it runs out of memory.

This reloading issue won’t happen in iPad 2 whether we are switching tabs or switching between apps, thanks to the 512MB RAM.

Check out the video below to see the difference in performance :-

I just make a video comparing the differences in software, apps and game (processing speed) on both iPad 2 & iPad 1 side-by-side.

One of the main differences you can find in iPad 2 is of course the Smart Cover. It wakes up the OS when we flip open the Smart Cover and the OS goes into sleep mode when we close the cover. This is one of the cool factors of iPad 2 and I believe it successfully attracts more buyers too.

There are 3 extra apps pre-installed in iPad 2 because it has a front-facing and rear camera.

• FaceTime app – An app for video chat with iPhone and iPad 2 users
• Camera app – Obviously it’s for shooting photo and video, using either front or rear camera
• Photo Booth app – Add special effects to the photo taken

On top of that, we have more apps to install on iPad 2 because some apps are specifically developed for iPad 2 to utilize the camera feature.

iPad 2 is running on a dual-core A5 processor and better graphic card chip, which is up to 9x faster than the iPad 1 (running a single-core A4 processor). Therefore, I tested the processing speed in apps loading, web browsing and game playing. Check out the video to see the speed difference yourself. :)

Please feel free to suggest if you have any other ideas or methods or comparison to bring the best out of the iPad 2.

This post is the first part of the comparison series that I will do between iPad 2 and iPad 1. As you have probably known, Apple did some improvements in the design of iPad 2 such as making it lighter, thinner in term of thickness, added built-in front & back camera, etc. Therefore, I think it’s worthwhile to compare both of them.

Apple has also released the measurement figures of iPad 2’s dimension and weight but we don’t see many side-by-side comparison between iPad 2 and iPad 1. So, I took a few photos of both iPads putting side-by-side to give a better picture of how different are they in term of the physical designs.

1. Thickness
iPad 2 (8.8mm) vs iPad 1 (13.4mm)

iPad 2 (left) is 33% thinner compared to iPad 1 (right)

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Differences Between iPad 2 vs iPad 1 (Physical Comparison)