Motorola Flipout

Accessorize your life with a smartphone that’s destined to turn heads. Introducing Motorola FLIPOUTTM with MOTOBLUR™– an innovative phone that’s as unique as you are. The touch screen’s pivot design exposes a five-row QWERTY keypad with a separate number row, transforming the phone from compact and pocketable to a charming social package. Stay in control with enhanced features on MOTOBLUR, including customizable filters for your Happenings and Messages widgets.

Size and Weight :

The Motorola Flipout is none of the above. You see the Flipout is a dinky square handset (67 x 67 x 17mm) with a very responsive touchscreen display on top, and a QWERTY keyboard that swivels (or as Motorola says "rotates") out from a central pivot in the top left-hand corner giving the phone its name. The FLIPOUT measures 67 x 67 x 17mm and weighs 120 grams, so it is a bit of an unusual shape to fit into a pocket when you consider that the DEXT has a more conventional 114 x 58mm footprint.

Network and connectivity:

This is a 3.5G device with a maximum download speed of 7.2 Mbps and upload speed of up to 2 Mbps. The Motorola FLIPOUT also supports WiFi as you might expect. There's a microSD slot (with a 2GB card in the standard sales package), a 3.5mm audio connector, Bluetooth and USB connectivity plus an FM radio. The FLIPOUT also comes with GPS and has a digital compass.

Camera and Video:

The back of the handset gives you a 3-megapixel camera, without flash, but with digital zoom, fixed-focus, which should be good enough for basic snapshots and occasional video clips, and Motorola have partnered with Kodak to integrate their technology for clearer pictures and easier sharing. The pictures has taken, both inside and out, were pretty ropey, while the video, which has three quality settings (the maximum resolution is 352 x 288) isn't that much better. Let's just say the camera is one of the phone's weaker points.

Memory and Display:

It has an internal memory of 512MB with removable 2GB Micro SD card (included); supports up to 32GB MicroSD. In fact, the main thing holding us back from outright FLIPOUT lust is the display. At 2.8-inches it’s not so much the scale as the QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels), which is low enough to make webpages a pixelated mush at all but the closest of zoom levels. A slightly higher resolution and this could find its way into a surprising number of professional pockets, we reckon.

Entertainment Features:

The media player of this handset supports FM Radio Receive, AAC, AAC+, AAC+ Enhanced, AMR NB, MP3, WMA v9, H.264, MPEG4, WMV v9. It grabs all your contacts from your Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, Bebo, Picasa and MySpace accounts, including their profile photos, and merges them with your Google account to fill up the phone's address book. Since all of that information is then stored in the cloud, you'll never lose your phone book if you misplace your handset.

Better still, the shape means there’s room for five rows of keys where many landscape keyboards on phones make do with four or even three. This means there’s a separate numbers row, instead of making you press extra keys to input digits. Excellent. In fact, the only disappointment here is that the navpad at the base of the keyboard is slightly fiddly.