Motorola's Atrix 4G

It might not have been officially released yet, but Motorola's new "smartphone" has already been rooted, reportsEngadget.

With the launch date still a couple of days away, a very clever fellow over at xda-developers has successfully rooted the Android OS the Atrix runs on, allowing all sorts of fancy applications and hacks to be run. Top of the list is enabling the mobile hotspot feature from Froyo, while running applications that require special administrator privileges like Titanium Backup (does what it says on the tin) and ShootMe (screen capture) is also made possible.

As Engadget points out however, as Motorola, or quite possibly AT&T has decided to lock the phone's bootloader, there is currently no way to flash the handset with any custom ROMs. No Cyanogen-fun to be had here folks, at least not yet anyway. Whether that will change in the future remains to be seen, but we've learned to never bet against the hacking community and we won't be changing that philosophy this time around either.

With the Atrix 4G sporting a 4-inch, 960 x 540 display, dual-core CPU and 1GB of RAM it's possibly one of the most anticipated handsets to come out this early into 2011 thanks to its exciting accessory accompaniment, though the excessive price of these may well hamper sales. The Atrix Laptop Dock ($299.99 minus $100 mail-in rebate) and HD Media Dock ($129.99) don't come cheap, and if you're not spending the cash on these, it could be worth a wait to see when the new crop of Android handsets announced at MWC will be appearing.