Motorola Mobility’s ATRIX line of smartphones are known for their LapDock accessories. When you dock an Atrix phone into a LapDock, the desktop-like WebTop OS loads, transforming the LapDock into an Android laptop of sorts.
However, without an ATRIX phone docked, the LapDock has no useful functionality. While it’s an interesting concept in theory, in reality WebTop OS hasn’t proven to be a “killer app” for ATRIX devices. Performance was sluggish. Strangely, the browser was a version of Firefox instead of Chrome. And finally, the LapDock itself was a ridiculously pricey accessory, considering it was useless without an ATRIX phone acting as its brains.
There is a rumor floating around that the next version of Android, so-called Jelly Bean, could have a desktop mode that’s similar to Motorola Mobility’s WebTop OS concept. When a Jelly Bean device is connected to an external display, it would shift into a desktop mode to make working on the larger external display easier. Hopefully a desktop mode feature built into the OS would work better than the separate WebTop OS.
Since Google is in the process of acquiring Motorola, this rumor sort of moves into the realm of reasonable speculation. But since not much is known about Android 5.0 at this point, it’s best to keep one’s skeptic hat on.
