Motorola Flipout review

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.