Motorola Flipout ready for UK launch on Orange

Motorola today announced its all new Flipout, a stylishly square and compact smartphone that Motorola says is as individual as its users.

That may not matter but the company surely has launched a modern phone, complete with the latest Android operating system that will appeal to a heck of a lot of people.


The Flipout will be available only on Orange, in the UK but will run Android 2.1 and features an innovative square pivot design that opens to reveal a five-row QWERTY keypad with a separate row for numeric keys.

Flipout features up to seven customizable home screens, live wallpapers and added security for exchange server users. It also offers enhanced Motoblur features making it easier to follow everything from Twitter to Facebook and your email in one easy to manage place.

"Flipout merges Motorola's design heritage with Android to deliver a new take on the typical smartphone form. In an incredibly compact square, Flipout fits neatly in your palm, purse or small pocket making it fun and easy to stay connected while on the go,” said Ralf Gerbershagen, vice president and GM, Mobile Devices, Western Europe, Motorola.

"For fans of social networking, Flipout also features enhancements to Motoblur allowing users to connect with their networks however they want.”
Flipouts come in a variety of colours but they will be country-specific and include Licorice, Fairway Green, Raspberry Crush, Brilliant Blue, Poppy Red, Saffron or White.

To celebrate the launch of FLIPOUT with MOTOBLUR, Motorola is launching the 'Hip To Be Square' competition, giving five winners the chance to take part in a professional fashion shoot and star as the European faces of FLIPOUT.

The prize includes an expenses paid trip to London where the shoot will take place, £500 spending money and a FLIPOUT handset. Visit

www.motorolasquare.com for more details.

Enhanced MOTOBLUR
MOTOBLUR is Motorola's exclusive Android experience that syncs contacts, posts, messages, photos and much more — from sources such as Facebook®, MySpace, Twitter™, Gmail™, work and personal e-mail, and last.fm — and automatically delivers them to the home screen.

MOTOBLUR automatically backs up contacts, log-in information, home screen customizations and e-mail to a secure server and provides remote data wipe for lost or stolen devices. One username and password restores contacts, messages and connectivity to prior networks and email providers.

FLIPOUT offers enhanced MOTOBLUR functionality and features, including:

Happenings and Messages - widgets filter by social networking account, by contact(s) or by contact group to only see the information you want
Screen customization - move and resize preloaded widgets on up to seven home screens
Battery Manager - manage battery consumption by operating in one of three performance modes
Data Manager - monitor data usage from the home screen to better manage pay-as-you-go and limited data plans
Personal and Corporate email - pushed directly to the device
Re-tweet capabilities

Hear and be heard
FLIPOUT includes CrystalTalkTM PLUS which improves a caller's voice quality while filtering out background noise for better conversations. Building on Motorola's proprietary microphone and speaker configuration, CrystalTalk PLUS adds a second microphone to provide even clearer voice quality while cutting down background noise.

Web & Multimedia
FLIPOUT brings optimal web and photo browsing to the palm of your hand with multi-touch pinch to zoom, and is Adobe® Flash® enabled which provides access to most content-rich websites.

For music fans, FLIPOUT's connected media player offers full screen lyric support, integrated song ID and a social solution for knowing what people around you are listening to.

Additional multimedia features include a 3MP camera with digital zoom and KODAK PERFECT TOUCH technology for better, brighter pictures and gallery mode for tagging and labeling of photos. One-touch uploads to Facebook, MySpace, Picasa and Photobucket make sharing your images quick and easy. Also included are video capture, playback and streaming options along with Bluetooth®1 capabilities for wireless calls and music.

FLIPOUT features full Google™ services including Google Search™, Google Maps™, Gmail™ and access to thousands of apps on the Android Market.

Availability
Motorola FLIPOUT with MOTOBLUR will be introduced to the UK this summer and will initially be available with Orange.

To learn more about the device visit YouTube™ or here. To experience MOTOBLUR, please visit www.motorola.com/motoblur.

REVIEW Nokia N97 it's very good - but has one fatal flaw

Nokia N97


I really wanted to like this phone. It is after all pretty powerful, and includes Nokia's neat mail for exchange which means my emails can be there on a top notch screen with a decent useable keyboard.

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It has the BBC iPlayer loaded as standard and has an iPhone-busting 32 Gb of memory, expandable using a memory card. It plays all types of video and web browsing promised to be pretty swift too.

My kind of phone I thought.

The N97 has been around almost a year and its smaller (slightly ) brother the N97 Mini has grabbed all the recent headlines.

But I like its size and the fact it does a lot. A smartphone needs to feel special and the N97 still does that.

Its touchscreen works well and the operating system will be familiar to everybody who's ever had a Nokia though on the N97 the Symbian OS looks even better thanks to a redesign.

Initial impressions were good and here are the big pluses on a phone that launched at more than £500 in the UK10 months ago but can now be secured for as little as £19 a month with unlimited internet access and load of calls and texts (See the 3 site for full details).

It flicks open with a reassuring thunk exposing the keypad. The touchscreen is bright and responded well to my finger touches. The home screen was easily set up to show what I wanted quick access to and it was easy to reach the applications folder to find what I need less often.

The 5meg camera, with Carl Zeiss lens, performed well and the video too worked easily well enough to satisfy Youtubers.

Web access was easy using the standard browser and I downloaded the excellent Opera 5 browser as a useful alternative.

Twitter came via the free download of Tweets60 from the ever improving Ovi Store and the Facebook app did all you could need.

I linked quickly to my Picasa account as well as Ovi's own pic and video sharing service so getting my pics from the phone to anywhere else was easy.

At this stage I was almost sold. Could this be a genuine all rounder with which I could sign up for a decent two-year contract relationship?

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Next I moved to the navigation section to check out the phone's Sat Nav qualifications which looked exceptional.

Directions came easily, my place on the map was pinpoint accurate (well, ok it was about 25 yards out) and I was immediately offered a choice of voices to instruct me. Impressive.

Nokia had kindly provided the phone for test but Ovi maps was offering an 8meg update. So I asked the impressive piece of kit to download it immediately.

And that's where the problem started.

The memory was too low it said. 'Delete some data and try again'.

I did, it did the same when I tried again.

What? This is a new phone and there's a whopping 32 Gb of onboard memory. Surely some mistake?

I spent an hour understanding the phone, where apps were stored, how the memory was divided into two, for example the emails were stored on the small 'phone' memory not the in-built 30 odd remaining gig. I moved some more things around, deleted a few apps… in fact all the things a new owner should not have to do.

For me there is a fascination; for most users this will be an irritating frustration and that makes the N97 a geek's phone, not for the ordinary user.

The N97 could have been a Blackberry-eating iPhone option for so many people but as far as I'm concerned this inability to download makes it a loser.

Worse than that, the problem is not solvable.

I consulted the geek-zone: message boards frequented by people who love to examine every aspect of their smartphone's performance, talk and compare, and who are those good people who advise the newcomer how to overcome the limitations of almost every phone made. And the N97's insufficient memory is not curable. You have to live with it.

I can't do that. I want the Ovi maps update, I want the 6gig app that will allow my N97 to play N-Gage games.

The N97 is a great phone that would have done everything I needed. I would have bought one myself despite being in a position where I'm testing new phones week in week out. But the unsolved download glitch and, arguably, its lack of RAM memory too, make the N97 a superb nearly phone.

The other glitches I could have lived with: it didn't want to default to WiFi when available, you had to select it and the fact I couldn't get the BBC iPlayer to work nine times out of ten.

The fact I knew, and would always know, I wasn't getting the very best out of the N97 takes it off my wish list.

It's a shame, it is a great phone. Look out for the N98 then...

Overall 6/10

Good
Great camera, great screen, great keyboard, simple to use. Still something of a multi-media bargain

Bad
Unable to download larger files and updates.


Conclusion
The N97 is a mini computer, which represented Nokias return punch to Apple and should have held Android keyboard phones like the Motorola Milestone at bay. Still a great phone f you like it just as it comes out of the box.

Review Gary Wright

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