Motorola Flipout review

Motorola’s range of Android handsets has included some bold designs. The Flipout’s is certainly quirky, but in everyday use we found it to be practical and conveniently small. Despite appearances, it’s no toy either: with Android 2.1 and some advanced features.

Its unique feature is a hinge at the corner that lets you swivel the screen around by 90 degrees to reveal a five-row QWERTY keyboard. The hinge is spring-loaded, and the action of flipping the screen open is smooth and precise, helping dispel doubts about build quality or longevity. There’s very little give in the opened hinge, and a solid metal plate behind the screen means there’s no flex there.

Although it might seem small, the keyboard is surprisingly good, and having a dedicated row for number keys is really useful. There’s even a small four-way pad for cursor control. The keys’ action is shallow but has a distinct bite, so you know when you’ve pressed one. Our only complaint would be that, with the USB cable plugged in, your right hand’s access to the keyboard is hindered.

The small touchscreen’s capacitive interface proved responsive. Image quality isn’t brilliant, however, with only a meagre 320×240 resolution. As with most LCD screens, viewing angles are optimised for the screen’s usual orientation. When closed the Flipout’s display looks fine, but when opened it is rotated around and the viewing angles are heavily compromised. Contrast and colour are good, however, and we had no problems reading the tiny fonts in the application tray.

Motorola hasn’t customised the user interface much. It’s added three buttons that persist across all home screens: one activates the phone keypad, one opens your contacts and the middle circle opens the application tray. There are a few extra widgets for the home screen, and a couple of useful apps: Motolocator finds all your contacts with address and lets you pinpoint them on the map, while the Happenings app is a social media aggregator, keeping track of all your friends’ Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm updates.

The Contacts app has also been customised to blend with social networks, and allows you to merge contacts from different services. As well as a Motoblur account, which lets you back everything up on Motorola’s servers, you can add Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, Picasa, Photobucket, MySpace, Bebo and Yahoo! accounts, as well as Google and Exchange accounts and standard POP3 or IMAP email accounts.

It may not be quite as slick as HTC’s Sense software, but Motorola’s customisations are useful and subtle, and having a recent version of Android helps a lot. The camera is good enough for web snaps, but lacking a flash it’s best used in daylight. The battery lasted just over a day in our light usage tests, which is better than average for an Android handset; although if you use WiFi and 3G data a lot, then you’ll still need to charge it every night.

Although the screen isn’t as good as some, the Flipout makes up for this with its unusual but practical design, and on the software side, it adds just enough functionality to Android without getting in the way. At over £200 it’s not cheap, however, although if you shop around you can get it on contract for £20 per month (make sure to get an unlimited data plan). The design won’t appeal to everyone, but if you’re after a real-world keyboard in a small package this is a good choice.