Around last Fall I was thinking about biting on an upgrade. My contract was nearly up, and I wanted to feel good about extending it. I'd had an OG Droid and a few other phones in between; I'd even drifted to WebOS and BlackBerry. I looked over the options, and felt good about none of them. What did feel good was the possibility of getting a Krait-based phone in the Spring. My big worry was that even by Summer I'd be looking at paying upwards of $250 to get one, even on-contract. Turns out, I was wrong.
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The earliest Krait devices came out at $199 on-contract, and the number of devices that have come out since then has been impressive, and the pricing keeps getting better. With the Incredible 4G LTE we saw pricing for a Krait device hit $149; but the device didn't have the right combination of factors to merit its price. Motorola's swing puts their first Krait device at $99, and there's nothing that competes with it in the US for twice that price. The form factor isn't perfect, but it's certainly thin enough and light enough. The software isn't just inoffensive, it's a pleasure to use, which is something we're saying more and more of when discussing skinned Android builds. And the battery life reflects one of Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4's biggest advantage.
It has its faults, and it could certainly be shined up to a gloss that would make it competitive with the Galaxy S III and HTC One X. Lacking a few features (NFC, notably) helps bring cost down, but that's not what keeps it from competing with the top tier phones. Holding the One X in your hand, you feel the level of effort that went into designing its unique unibody frame. When you see the Galaxy S II in Pebble Blue, and the light coming through the window hits it just right, it almost seems like the whole front of the device is a single blue surface. There's nothing about the Atrix HD that inspires that kind of fascination.
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So, what does it take to be a great mid-range phone? We can excuse the body, we can excuse an imperfect camera, and we can even excuse missing features. You nail the mid-range phone by making sure the rest of the package is solid, and that's what AT&T has with the Atrix HD.
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