Motorola Atrix (coming soon to Australia!)

The Motorola Atrix is a phone but is more closely related to computers.

Though the world is going gah-gah for smartphones and tablets, both suffer an inflexibility of form. A smartphone fits great in your pocket, but its small screen makes it difficult to perform certain intensive tasks; tablets, on the other hand, are roomier, with larger screens, bigger keyboards and clearer videos, but most require a backpack to travel, leaving many tablets at home on the bed stand.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, Motorola showed one way to circumvent these issues of size and the need for owning both devices. The Motorola Atrix is a smartphone of a familiar shape and size, but once it's place into one of two docking accessories, the Atrix offers an experience more like a computer than a phone.

Laptop dock for the Atrix
(Credit: Motorola)

The first dock is the HD Dock, a stand the size of a block of cheese, with inputs for a mouse and keyboard, and outputs for a monitor. The second is an empty laptop shell, with an 11.6-inch screen, a full-size keyboard, a battery and two USB ports. The genius is that in both cases it's the phone that provides all the processing and access to data. This means you only need one SIM card and you don't need to be sharing data you store on your phone with other devices.

To power this set-up, the Atrix employs a new dual-core Tegra 2 processor with two 1GHz processors on-board and 1GB RAM. It also has 16GB of internal storage, plus you can connect an external drive to either of the docks to access even more data.

The design of the Atrix is neat without being eye-catching. More impressive is the phone's qHD resolution (960x540) LCD. There's also an enormous 1930mAh battery under the hood that should keep you charged for the better part of a couple of days.

Cnet Australia, http://www.cnet.com.au/motorola-atrix-339308370.htm 

What difficulties did you encounter and how did you overcome them?

I encountered many difficulties, some of which were picking a character to use, tranferring frames from home to school to work on without a USB, making the actual animation and formatting the animation as VLC.

When we began the assignment the character I chose was Elmo. Unfortunately when I was tracing him Inkscape froze and after a few attempts at redoing everything I came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work and I won't be able to make any progress. So I resulted to picking a new character. My second choice was to use yellow,orange,green,blue and pink gemstones to represent the other colours and a ruby to represent Veritas. The animation was going to be the 6 other colours dancing in all happy and then the ruby comes flying in and zaps all the other colours away. But I wasn't sure I really liked the idea so I didn't continue with that. After deciding not to do Elmo or the gemstones animation it took me a while to figure out what I was going to do. I looked up cars and a red truck popped up so I decided to use a fire engine truck to represent Veritas. I was glad with my final decision and still am.

Another difficulty was tranferring the frames from to school to home. This is because my USB was misplaced and I couldn't transfer all the frames from home to school or school to home by email. So I decided to make all the frames at home then save it on my memory card to take to school and make it an animation.

When all the frames were made and I saved them on my memory card I took them to school to make into an animation. At first, when I was transferring the images from my memory card to Movie Maker it worked but saving it as a VLC was difficult to do because I forgot how to change it. Then when I was trying to reopen and resave the animation Movie Maker froze and wasn't working. So instead I used my sister's USB and transffered the frames into the USB then transferred them into my S drive and school. I was successful in doing so and I also figured out how to save the animation as a VLC folder with the help of one of the girls in another IST class.

What is the final size of your animation?

The final size of the animation is 5.73 MB, with 566 frames and lasts for 27 seconds.

What frame rate were you aiming for?

The frame rate I was aiming for was at least 3-5 seconds per frame. When my final animation was made i did have each frame at 5 seconds per frame resulting in the animation being more than 20 seconds.



One of my frames for the animation.



What image format did you save your frames as?

My frames were saved as PNG images so that it could easily be transferred into Movie Maker.

PNG images

My little Veritas truck !!!!!! (animation assignment)

I was finally able to upload my animation on to blogger !!!!!