What the laptop dock or, Lapdock is, in effect, is an extremely well constructed dock for the Atrix phone, adding a long life battery, a keyboard, a large touch pad, two USB ports, and a pair of stereo speakers. It looks like the Cr 48 Chrome OS laptop, and or even a sleek thin and light. At 2.4 pounds it’s easy to tote, and has a sturdy feel when the lid is closed.

But it’s not a standalone machine: The Atrix needs to be plugged in for the laptop dock to work. The good news is that the transformation is seamless and hot swappable: Plug it in and the dock boots up. Unplug and the phone’s back in your hand, ready to go.

The Motorola operating environment once the dock is running feels a lot like the Splashtop “quick start” OS environments found on some laptops and Netbooks: a pared down launchpad for a few key applications and a Web browser. The actual phone screen is replicated in the dock’s 11.5 inch display, as a pixel perfect window. Buttons can be virtually pressed using Air Jordan 11s the touch pad’s mouse cursor, but since the laptop dock’s screen doesn’t have touch capability, you can’t use the same multitouch gestures as you would on the phone. The screen can be flipped horizontally or vertically with the click of a software button, or even blown up to near full screen, in much the same way that the iPad pixel doubles iPhone apps for large screen viewing.

A separate set of launch button hot keys will bring up contacts or the Atrix phone dialer, and, yes, you can make phone calls while the Atrix is docked, even over Bluetooth. Of course, on a laptop you can do the same with Skype, VoIP, or Google Voice, and on an iPad there are solutions, too.

No Chrome

Here’s the funny part, at least to me: even though this is an Android phone, the baked in browser on the Motorola dock is Firefox. Herein lies the sense of disconnect. In a future world where devices seamlessly sync and transform function, the top to bottom OS functionality here should remain Google based. If this dock were able to run Chrome OS and Chrome apps, or at the very least a Chrome browser, and even seamlessly integrate Android and Chrome functionality, we’d really be touching the future. Instead, Jordan 10 Retro the dock’s Motorola OS feels clever but tacked on. Firefox is capable of playing Flash based sites Jordan Winterized 6 Rings and videos, and did a decent but not great job of full screen Hulu playback comparable with what you’d get on a Netbook. It’s also, based on anecdotal office use over our standard Wi Fi, considerably slower than other laptops. Writing in Google Docs became a sluggish affair, and after a while it felt like we’d be more productive simply undocking the phone.

One notable advantage to Firefox is its included Citrix application, enabling account holders to hop on their virtual desktops using the Lapdock. That’s a nice touch and a boon for certain users, but it doesn’t help people relying on the Lapdock with no remote PC to connect to.

The laptop dock does have a few neat tricks up its sleeve. A built in HD media playback app works a bit like an Apple TV interface, playing full screen movies, photos, and music. An HD video shot on the Atrix looked great on the 11.5 inch screen, accompanied by crisp audio from the side mounted built in stereo speakers on the back of the dock. Unfortunately, this media player doesn’t play files in the background. Play some music and exit the player, and the program hard exits and leaves you tuneless.

There’s also a native PDF reader for opening files while in Firefox, but for editing word or office docs, attachments are opened on the emulation of the phone’s window. That window is Air Jordan 5s mighty small on a big screen, but blowing up the window results in a slightly low res, but workable environment for editing word documents. It’s not a perfect solution, but it does do the job while offering both a keyboard and a larger screen.

The rear USB ports are compatible with mice Air Jordan 2010 or USB flash drives, both of which add some nice functionality and make the dock feel even more laptoplike. At $300, you could get a 10 inch Atom Netbook instead. At $500, you could buy an iPad or an 11.6 inch full fledged mini laptop, like the