Motorola Flipout (AT&T)

Hi, I'm Kent German, senior editor for cnet.com. Today, we're gonna take a first look at the Motorola Flipout. This is a new Android phone for AT&T. It does look like the Nokia 7705 Twist that we saw about a year ago. It has that the same square shape with a flipping or swivel action. It's about 2.8 inches, which is fine for most phones, but on a touchscreen phone, I found it just not adequate. The touchscreen is pretty responsive. But even when you got the 7 homescreen, which is nice, you get 7 is still pretty crowded. So if you put, you know, if you put a couple---- you're gonna put up with widgets there that available at the MotoBlur, so like you Unified Inbox and maybe your Twitter module, it take about most half the room. So, I wasn't really impressed with that. I did like the keyboard, however. I found it was pretty big, pretty spacious, so actually quite surprisingly spacious for the phone of this size. The keys are dome, so they feel nice being with the finger, they are pretty stiff, and I could almost type I feel if I wanted to. Swivel mechanism does feel pretty sturdy. And also another thing about the display, I found is that it does have 16 million colors, but not the greatest pixel resolution, it's 320 x 280, so some photos and graphics look quite as sharp as I'd like. You'll see that the phone dialer is the virtual dial pad. I didn't have a problem of that, kind of pretty big. There is accelerometer on the phones. If you like, you actually can use a virtual keyboard, but I don't know why you'd want to because it's really, really small. Many designs are pretty standard, very android. Inside, you'll find not a huge amount of features as far as Smart phone goes, but as all the essentials for communication standard Google apps like Google maps or navigation, Google talk. It has Bluetooth, organize your options, camera, media player, so everything you'd expect in here. A couple things that I did like, though, it does have a dedicated file manager. You also have this thing called phone portal, which actually allows you access to, one convenient access to syncing your phone either through USB cable or through wi-fi and that was pretty convenient, too. The Motorola does include an orange back cover in the box, so if you have the black and orange, you can just turn them out as you'd like. The Flipout does run Android 2.1 but we would like to see Froyo, but 2.1 is a really good start, it will be upgradable to 2.2. At some point, overall, I think the Flipout if you can deal with the size, it's an interesting phone. It certainly has some good features and I like that keyboard, but I think the display is much too small for a touchscreen device. I'm Kent German, and this is the Motorola Flipout.