Gadgetory

hi I'm Sherman senior editor for cnet.com today we're gonna take a first look at the Motorola flip-out this is a new Android phone for AT&T it does look like the Nokia 7705 twist that we saw about a year ago has that same square shape with the flipping or swivel action it's about 2.8 inches which is fine for most phones but on a touchscreen phone found it just not adequate the touch screen is pretty responsive but even when you go to the seven home screens which is nice you get seven it's still pretty crowded so if you put a few no you put a couple if you couple up with the widgets they're that available with your motoblur so like you're in a fight inbox and maybe a Twitter module they take up almost half the room so wasn't really impressed with that 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 domed so they feel nice meeting of the fingers they're pretty stiff and I could almost type I feel if I wanted to the swivel mechanism does feel pretty sturdy um 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 by 280 so some photos and graphics didn't quit look quite as sharp as I'd like you'll see that the phone dialer is the virtual dial pad didn't have a problem with that found it pretty big there is a accelerometer on their 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 really small menu design is pretty standard very Android inside you'll find I'm not a huge amount of features as far as the smart phone goes but has all the essentials for communication standard Google Apps like Google Maps with navigation Google Talk has bluetooth with organizer options camera media player so everything you'd expect in here a couple things that I did like though are 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 sync in your phone either through a USB cable or through Wi-Fi so that was pretty convenient - 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 like the flip-out does run Android 2.1 we'd really like to see Fri oh but 2.1 is a really good start it will be upgradeable to 2.2 at some point overall I think the flip out if you can deal with the size it's an interesting phone certainly has some good features and I like that keyboard but I think that displays much too small for a touchscreen device I'm Ken Sherman and this is the Motorola flip-out