The Motorola Flipout is a brand new handset released by the giant’s smartphone manufacturer, now owned by Google. The gadget is heavily packed with social media and messaging features. This is a very cheap handset, costing around £200 without the SIM card. Basically, the phone is aimed at the young market.
Motorola Flipout may not be the best handset for the traveling CEO, but a nice gadget nonetheless. The square design is quite unusual, immediately catching your eye for the first time you notice it. What’s really nice about the design of this phone is that it literally flips out when it opens.
In order to have access to the mini qwerty keyboard, you need only one hand to operate the hidden hinge placed on the corner of the phone. What is surprising about this specific feature is that it shouldn’t work, considering the mall proportions this gadget has, but it does! The whole process of opening the keyboard is very smooth, only a minimum effort is required.
It features a cool design, it is really neat and perfect for the target which is aimed at, the young audience. One important clarification here, if you are left hander, you may have some difficulties opening the phone in the same manner, although a thing is certain, you won’t look as cool.
Nobody knows if Motorola plans to release a version for the left hander, but the common sense would be good enough reason to do so. The qwerty keyboard is not working well, it works very well! You will soon find yourself completing messaging tasks with extreme easy and quickness. You also have an extra row for numbers, resembling larger smartphones making emailing and all the other texting tasks a joy.
Funny or not, when you take it out of your pants pocket, there is a 25% chance you have it the right way, since the opener is placed on only one side. It would be great if Motorola manages to do something about this, a nice screen rotation would be nice or some sort of physical detail, making it more intuitive to open.
It would be fair to say that indeed, this is a smartphone for the young person. Powered by the Android operating system, the phone boasts its own messages software, the Motorola MotoBlur. If you are a die-hard Motorola fan you will pick this message software right away, while other non-attached users might prefer to download their own favorite messaging app.
It’s important to point out the fact that a lot of applications won’t work as you might expect, simply because they were designed to fit a rectangular screen, with larger screen capacity, and not the Flipout’s square screen.
The screen resolution is only 240 by 320 pixels, making this phone a low end gadget, in terms of accessing media and browsing the web. Also, text will sometimes appear blocky and web pages won’t display properly due to the smaller screen. The zoom and pinch functions work perfect though, probably because the capacitive technology is more responsive on smaller displays.
The Motorola Flipoutcomes with a pretty strong processor for its size, a 600 MHz chip with 512 MB RAM and teamed up with media capabilities and all the camera features, this gadget is almost reaching out the market’s mid-segment.
Overall, this is a great phone for users that are less picky. On the other hand, hardcore users should look on a different direction. This is mainly an entry level gadget, designed for young people that want to make their social life more interesting. It’s nice to use it for a while but at some point you will get bored, since it’s common features are restricted by low end capabilities, small screen size and the square shape.
For those young people that want an upgrade for their Motorola Flipout but they don’t want to pay $700 on a new handset, they can very well buy a used product instead. Thanks to companies that are advocating cell phone recycling, you now have access to wide range of used products, that still work great. And the price is sometimes twice as low. Check trade2save for more info.
