Motorola FLIPOUT review (part one)

Motorola FLIPOUT review

Available from Clove on pre-order. Due in September for £233.83.

Throughout the past two decades there have been very few phones that change our view of what is acceptable in terms of form factor and size.

In 1994 the Sony CM-R111 was a revolution. It had no screen and merely displayed signal coverage and battery power using LEDs, but it was unbelievably tiny and showed that small mobile phones were possible. Unfortunately it took many more years to this type of phone size to become commonplace.

Motorola released the StarTAC in 1996 and it quickly became ‘the’ mobile phone to own. It was like nothing before it and to say the design was a complete revolution would be an understatement.

In 2004 Motorola debuted the RAZR and in effect produced another StarTAC moment. It was truly beautiful to look at and to use and everyone wanted one. In fact so many people wanted the RAZR that it quickly became the biggest selling mobile phone in the world and Motorola made the mistake of producing variations on this design for far too long.

As it happens I owned all of the above phones and they were all super impressive for their time. They held that magical quality of feeling too small for what they could do and years ahead of their respective times.

Here we are in 2010 and Motorola is launching the FLIPOUT. Is this another magic moment in the history of mobile phones? The difference is that it is a smartphone, not a standard mobile, and it is competing with other advanced devices like the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini that are trying to break the mould in terms of how a mobile should be formed. This is a difficult battle and at first glance it looks as though the FLIPOUT is a gimmick waiting to bomb like so many other Motorola products from the past few years. It’s not quite that easy to judge though…

First Impressions

This is a pre-production unit so I can’t judge the packaging or accessories, but presume that an AC charger, USB cable and headphones will be included. The phone itself I can judge quite easily from a hardware perspective and I have to say that I was blown away when I first picked it up.

With a footprint of 67 x 67mm it feels impossibly small and is unlike anything I have used before. The 17mm depth is noticeable and this is not a phone that will sit in your pocket without making a bulge, but the main dimensions take the smartphone to a place it has not ventured before.

I’m not a science fiction fan, but the phone gives a feeling that you are picking something up from an episode of Star Trek. It feels light years ahead of other smartphones purely because of it diminutive dimensions and square form. It doesn’t feel like a phone, but more a tiny PDA when you hold it without the keyboard exposed and is completely unique in achieving this.

I have big hands and expected to struggle with the touch screen on such a small phone, but instead found it perfectly natural to pick up and start navigating with my finger. Even in closed mode the icons are placed perfectly below the screen and after the merest of times I felt at home with this strangest looking of phones.

Swiveling out the keyboard brings more unnaturalness to the experience because it just feels really odd the first few times you do it. I can understand why it has to be this way because there would not have been enough space for the keys if it was a slider and FLIPOUT is quite a good name so I guess that Motorola wanted to stick with that. It serves no discernible purpose at all by swiveling, but for novelty alone it may help sell a few more devices. It also looks great when a call arrives and you swivel the phone to answer it and kind of reminds me of the quick flick many people perfected with the RAZR a few years back. The screen orientation stays the same when you swivel it which is not expected, but it works, and the mechanism attaching the two parts of the phone appears to be very strong.

Motorola seems to be presuming that people will use this phone in open mode most of the time because in closed mode the volume keys are at the top and the on/off button is on the right. The microUSB is at the bottom and the 3.5mm headphone jack is just above the on/off button. In open mode everything moves and becomes more traditional; on/off and headphone jack at the top, volume keys on the left and microUSB on the right.

Personally I would like to see the buttons the other way around because I believe that most will use the touch screen to check Twitter, view bookmarks and clear alarms etc. without needing the keyboard and even more importantly are likely to close the phone before using the side buttons. It’s not a big deal, but is a slight design flaw in my opinion.

There is no touch screen keyboard here which makes sense because the screen is small at 2.8″ and the hardware keyboard is only a twist away (hmmm, the Motorola TWIST? That’s an even better name). You can’t expect much from a keyboard that is only 67mm square, but what a surprise it is. There are 5 full rows of keys including a number row and after 10 minutes I felt right at home with it. I hadn’t realised how useful a dedicated number row is, and how often I type numbers, and every part of the keyboard has been a joy to use. The over large enter key is extremely useful and even the two-key wide space bar works well with a mini navigation pad in the corner for good measure. Trust me on this, it is one of the best keyboards in the industry which is amazing considering the size and shows what can be done in a small space.

Overall the hardware is way better than I expected. From the positioning of the microSD slot, just above the battery, to the screen which works ‘much’ better than I expected in bright conditions the FLIPOUT does not feel like an exercise in miniaturisation, but a full smartphone in a tiny body.

On Tuesday I will cover the software, general performance and sum up my thoughts on the FLIPOUT, but so far it is looking very positive indeed.