Thank you AT&T for putting the bloody boot of greed on the future
At this year’s Consumer Electronic Show (CES 2011) one of the big winners attention wise had to be Motorola with their announcement about the XOOM tablet and the Atrix dockable phone.
After reading about the Atrix I said publicly that I think this could be the future of our computers, after all once you stop to think about it the concept makes sense in so many ways.
At the time of the announcement though we didn’t have a price for either of the products but many of the tech pundits that I read felt that for the Atrix to be successful it would depend on the final retail price.
Well we found out today AT&T has decided once again to place profit ahead of being at the forefront of the future as they released the prices for the Atrix 4G handset and the laptop dock for the phone.
According to Jared Newman at Technologizer the announced price of $200 for just the handset was to be expected; but when it comes to the laptop dock AT&T went totally off the deep end.
But the laptop dock, which taps the phone’s processor to run a full version of the Firefox browser, will cost $500 on its own. You can get the phone and dock together for $500, but then you’ll have to include tethering (another $20 per month) in your contract. And even if you don’t take the bundle, the dock will still require tethering to access AT&T’s network.
The laptop dock consists only of a screen, keyboard, mouse and battery, and yet it costs the same on its own as an entire high-powered netbook, processor and all. That alone is a dealbreaker. But the real disappointment is AT&T’s attitude towards the very concept of docking. Even though the dock’s sole functionality is to browse the web — and not perform bandwidth-intensive desktop tasks like online gaming or peer-to-peer file sharing — AT&T still treats it like a full-blown laptop
I really think that both Motorola and AT&T had a chance here to have a game changer – just as AT&T did with the iPhone – but with insane pricing like this they blown it. Period.
