Motorola's two new Android phones the Triumph (L) and the Bionic (R)
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Sadly, I still found myself wanting to like the lapdock more than actually liking it. The whole experience is sluggish in a way that the phone isn't when it's being a phone — the cursor, for instance, seemed to huff and puff to keep up with my finger on the touchpad. When I tried to play Facebook's Bejeweled Blitz, I got a message saying I needed a newer version of Flash Player. I attempted to install one, and gave up after being confronted with cryptic messages by Linux, the nerdy operating system that powers the Bionic/lapdock combo. As an idea, the Webtop remains cool; here's hoping that Motorola continues to plug away at the concept.
With the Bionic, as with most smartphones, the simple question "How much does it cost?" is surprisingly tough to answer. It lists for $589.99 with a 16GB storage card, but if you sign up for a two-year contract, it's $299.99. And if you qualify for a contract and currently have a Verizon "basic" phone rather than a smartphone, you qualify for a $100 rebate.
Of course, it makes no sense to obsess over the cost of the handset itself: it's dwarfed by the price you'll pay for two years of wireless service. In the case of the Bionic, you'll spend $129.99 a month if you want unlimited calling and text messaging plus 5GB of Internet data.
Or you could spurn the Bionic and Verizon altogether and take your business to Virgin Mobile, a division of Sprint that specializes in prepaid wireless. With Virgin and other prepaid carriers such as MetroPCS and Cricket, you plunk down your money for the month ahead rather than the one that just passed. There are no commitments, contracts or credit checks, and service is vastly cheaper than postpaid service from Verizon or AT&T.
Prepaid plans have traditionally appealed to folks with tight budgets and/or shaky credit. But you don't need to be in dire financial straits to find the proposition appealing. At Virgin, unlimited everything — calling, Internet, and messaging — is just $55 a month.
What's the catch? Prepaid carriers don't subsidize your phone if you sign up for a contract, since there are no contracts. You pay full price — an economic model which tends to dumb down the smartphones these carriers offer, since people who are trying to slash their phone bill are even less likely to shell out $500 or $600 for a handset than the rest of us are.
Still, prepaid smartphones are getting better, and Virgin's new Android flagship, the Triumph, is a case in point. Like the Bionic, it's from Motorola and goes for $299.99. But in this case, that's the full price. It's nearly 50% cheaper than an undiscounted Bionic.
At first blush, the Triumph looks like the Bionic's skinnier, boxier fraternal twin, in part because it's got a 4.1" display that's nearly as roomy, although with fewer pixels. However, it's really more comparable to Motorola's Droid X, a phone that was up-to-the-moment when it was released way back in the spring of 2010. It runs Android 2.2 Froyo — a version that dates from the Droid X's era — rather than 2.4 Gingerbread, the current version for phones. It has a single-core processor and half the Bionic's RAM, so it feels merely adequately fast, not downright zippy. Its rear camera does middling 5-megapixel stills and 720p video. (I also found its shutter laggier than the Bionic's.)
Rather than running on Sprint's 4G network, the Triumph only does 3G. What you lose in speed, however, you might gain back in battery life: When I charged up both phones and used them for a few hours on their default settings, the Triumph was still at 50 percent when the Bionic started begging me to plug it into a power source.
Overall, the Triumph isn't exactly a triumph, and it won't appeal to hardcore phone geeks who know by heart exactly which version of Android they've got. But if you crave a smartphone and are allergic to contracts and three-digit monthly wireless bills, it's a good value for the money, and its arrival is welcome news. Maybe they should have called it the Motorola Sensible.
McCracken blogs about personal technology at Technologizer, which he founded in 2008 after nearly two decades as a tech journalist; on Twitter, he's @harrymccracken. His column, also called Technologizer, appears every week on TIME.com.