Motorola FLIPOUT Review

Connectivity and Data:
 
The Motorola FLIPOUT is a quad-band GSM phone with dual-band 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 and AGPS.
 
While the handset comes with Android’s default web-browser, due to the nature of its screen and the phone’s form-factor, the browsing experience isn’t like other Android devices we’ve seen. Web pages open in overview by default, though this can be changed to various levels of zoom. On the Motorola FLIPOUT’s 2.8 inch screen with a 320x240 pixel count, little is discernable beyond images until you zoom in. The phone utilizes pinch to zoom technology as we’ve come to expect, though with only 2.8 inches to pinch, it’s not the most comfortable of zooming experience. Fortunately, the browser also offers a double-tap to zoom option which provides a more functional alternative. The default browser also cannot be viewed in full-screen which is a shame on a screen of this resolution as every pixel counts, however, other browsers such as Opera Mini can, and in turn make browsing the web on the handset more enjoyable if you’re prepared to sacrifice the flash support and multi-touch. Overall however, even without a 3rd party web browser, Android’s default browser still managed to present pages very well for a handset of this size, and in-turn deliver a decent browsing experience.
 
Motorola’s Phone Portal worked a treat with the Motorola FLIPOUT, reinforcing its status as a quirky, though ultimately usable handset. This feature enabled us to browse and control the device with a PC either via USB or Wi-Fi. We found the Wi-Fi option especially quick and easy. To activate this, we simply connected the phone to the same network as our computer, activated the application on the phone, and it provided us with a custom URL. This, when pasted into a web-browser acted as a control and file-explorer for the phone. It was faultless in our tests.




The on-board AGPS takes advantage of Google Maps and Google Navigator, both of which worked very well. When using the Motorola FLIPOUT as a GPS, it became evident that the form-factor when closed is reminiscent of a small GPS unit, with the quirky design providing added versatility. The device especially excelled when hand-holding it and using the GPS when walking thanks to it being smaller than most standalone / phone GPS units. The only concern when using the Motorola FLIPOUT as a GPS is the impact on battery life, leaving us strongly recommending a car charging kit if navigation is one of the handset’s intended end-uses.


Software:
 
Motorola’s MOTOBLUR, the manufacturer’s customization to Android tries to streamline and integrate social-networking into the phone’s UI, and while this may be a good concept, for the most part, its application on the Motorola FLIPOUT is clunky and tedious. The associated re-sizable widget, ‘Happenings’, can be placed on the home screen. The first issue with this particular widget is that it needs to be enlarged to display any amount of useful information, however, with the low pixel-count of the screen, this left our unit with an entire home-screen containing a single Facebook update. In addition, when clicking through any of the links, only one update could be displayed at a time, providing a frustratingly long-winded method of keeping up-to-date with our social networks. In contrast, the status updater worked very well, enabling us to update multiple social networking statuses from a single widget which we found useful and time-saving. The beauty of using Android is ultimately that we could choose how heavily MOTOBLUR widgets featured on our Motorola FLIPOUT, and in turn only enable the widgets that enhanced the experience, so while the widgets that don’t work wasted a bit of time, they didn’t impose their way into our end use.
 
Android Market works well on the FLIPOUT. While we were aware that not all apps would be compatible with the phone’s lower resolution screen, all the ones we used worked perfectly. In fact, the inclusion of the physical QWERTY made some apps such as Gdocs much more usable than on other exclusively touch-screen handsets.