By Stephen Schenck | September 14, 2012 2:52 PM
A couple months back, when we learned that Motorola’s Atrix HD was arriving without the Webtop support enjoyed by the previous Atrix models, we wondered if the company was quietly killing-off the feature. The closest thing to an answer we got was Motorola claiming that the decision not to have Webtop on the Atrix HD was in the interest of keeping costs down. A new report claims that things might go a lot farther than that, and that Google and Motorola have been instructing engineers to forget about Webtop support on all new phones.
Certainly, the fresh wave of RAZR-series models is landing without any Webtop, and there haven’t been any signs of it showing up on any still in-development models. Current Webtop-supporting dock hardware is apparently being sold at deep discounts, just short of giving it away free.
One theory suggests that Google wants to put the halt on Webtop as a separate software project so that it can one day be implemented into the main Android branch. That’s not so hard to believe, especially considering the big improvements Ice Cream Sandwich brought to Webtop 3.0. Of course, there’s no word on how long it would take to prepare for a big step like that, so Webtop fans may be looking at quite the dry spell for the foreseeable future.
