The seemingly unstoppable march of Android devices continues, with yet another Android device being announced, this time we have the Motorola FlipOut with MotoBlur. It’s one of the strengths of the Android OS, that it is not tied to any one particular manufacturer. Whereas Apple have their iPhone OS, and Symbian is found more often than not on Nokia devices, Android has products from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Motorola, and lesser known names such as Huawei, Dell, Acer and Asus. The wide variety of manufacturers also brings a lot of creative thinking to these products, and whilst the traditional PDA look is the most common, there are a few devices that offer something a little different in the style department, and the Motorola FlipOut certainly comes under that heading.
The shape of the FlipOut is square, with the phone measuring 67mm up and 67mm across. Depth of the device is 17mm, and it weighs in at a pretty healthy 120g. The rather unusual factor with the device though, is the ‘flipout’ QWERTY keyboard, which is hinged to the upper half of the phone at the bottom right corner. The keyboard flips out from the left as you look at the phone, and rotates round until the QWERTY keyboard is sitting flush beneath the main display. The QWERTY keyboard itself is a 5 row keyboard, with the top row dedicated to numbers, and a full QWERTY layout on the following four rows. In the bottom left hand corner of the phone is a five way Navi pad, which helps you to move the cursor around the screen when the keypad is accessible.
The display itself on the phone is a TFT touchscreen, measuring 2.8 inches across, supporting up to 256,000 colours and with a QVGA resolution. The device includes an accelerometer for auto rotation of the display when the keypad pops out, and Motorola have included their proprietary MotoBlur UI on the device, which sits over Android 2.1 OS. The MotoBlur UI is a very bright, eye catching UI, with stand out icons, almost carton like in design. The UI can aggregate information from multiple social networking accounts, and then presents the info directly on to the main display. The overall design of the phone, and the MotoBlur UI itself, seems geared towards a younger user, and the FlipOut seems destined to bring Android to a mass audience in the teen market, rather than attract the power using ‘geek’, which some other Android handsets are aimed at. It is most unlikely that the FlipOut will rank high on devices that are primed for rooting.
The FlipOut is a Quad Band GSM handset, with Dual Band HSDPA operating on the 900 and 2100 bands. HSDPA is supported up to 7.2 Mbps, and HSUPA is included at up to 2.0 Mbps. The device also includes WiFi 802.11 b/g, and also delivers Class 12 GPRS and EDGE. Local connectivity is supported with Bluetooth 2.1, which includes A2DP stereo audio support, and there is a Micro USB 2.0 connector for connecting the device to a PC via data cable. Internal memory capacity is 256 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM, and a Micro SD memory expansion slot supports memory cards up to 32 GB in size. This is all powered by a TI OMPA 3410 700 MHz processor.
In keeping with the youth appeal of the Motorola FlipOut, the handset will be available in a range of bright colour options, including White, Fairway Green, Poppy Red, Raspberry Crush, Brilliant Blue, Liquorice and Saffron. The FlipOut incorporates a solid, if a little unspectacular, 3.2 Megapixel camera, with video record facility. Output isn’t fantastic, but it will be good enough to share with friends via the social network of your choice. A stereo FM radio is included, as well as a media player, and there is a full GPS receiver built in, with aGPS support, and a digital compass feature. Google Maps comes as standard, and the device also supports the Street View option, which works really well. And of course there are all the standard Android features, with full support for the Google Mobile services including Gmail, Google Chat and Google Calendar.
The Motorola FlipOut with MotoBlur is an interesting product, and it is good to see manufacturers prepared to deliver a product that is a little different from the rather boring and normal PDA style device. If Android really is going to break into the mass market, rather than be a niche OS reserved solely for smartphone handsets, then more devices like the FlipOut will be needed.
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