Motorola Flipside Review: First Look and Specifications

Motorola Flipside Review: First Look and Specifications
Page content

Motorola Flipside Review: First Look

Just about a week before the Windows Phone 7 launch event by Microsoft, which has been hogging all the limelight for the past week, Motorola announced three new phones powered by Android. All three were budget Android smartphones, with very different designs than what we have seen in the Android world so far.

We have already covered two of them - the Motorola Spice and the Motorola Bravo. The third one is the Motorola Flipside. It has a nice design with a horizontal slider form factor. It has good hardware specs and runs Android 2.1 Eclair.

Design

The Motorola Flipside is a stylish phone with a standard horizontal QWERTY keyboard form factor. It has a 3.1 inch TFT capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. Below the display are the four standard touch sensitive keys - Menu, Home, Search and Back. It also has a trackpad which is very useful for navigation when using the keyboard. The 4 row keyboard slides out from under the display and looks quite good with good key spacing. It has dimensions of 109.5 x 57.5 x 15 mm and a weight of around 145 gms which makes it a bit bulky.

Hardware and OS

The Motorola Flipside is quite good when it comes to hardware, especially when you consider that it’s a budget smartphone. It is powered by a TI OMAP 3410 processor clocled at 720 MHz. It comes with 512 MB RAM and a 512 MB internal ROM. It has 150 MB user storage and supports up to 32 GB microSD cards.

It runs Android 2.1 Eclair with the MotoBLUR UI. It should probably get an upgrade to Android 2.2 Froyo soon, it surely has the hardware to support it.

Multimedia

This is the only department where the Motorola Flipside fares badly; it comes with just a 3.15 MP camera with a maximum image capture resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. It doesn’t offer either autofocus or flash. Considering that even budget phones these days sport 5 MP cameras, Motorola should have given one to the Flipside too.

It has an FM radio with RDS and supports audio/video playback of the standard formats - MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC and MP4, 3GP, WMV, H.264 etc.

Connectivity

The Motorola Flipside offers all the standard connectivity options like GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP. It also offers microUSB connectivity and has a GPS chip with A-GPS support. It comes with the default Android Webkit browser and the MotoBLUR UI is integrated with social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.

Conclusion

The Motorola Flipside is a decent budget Android option. It has nice hardware specs and runs Android 2.1 Eclair. A better camera would have been good, but if priced right, it could be a very popular phone. Also, do check out our list of the <strong>best Android smartphones</strong>.