CTIA Fall 2010
To get a feel for the Motorola Flipside, imagine someone took a hammer to the Motorola Backflip, then picked up all the pieces and put them back in a different order. The phone has a very large, generous QWERTY keyboard that slides out from underneath (nothing actually flips on this phone), just like the Backflip had a massive keyboard. The phone gets the Backflip's touchpad, but now it's up front, where it might have a better a shot at being used. That trackpad also doubles as a button, so you can click down on it for a selecting action.
The phone doesn't flip backwards, leaving the keyboard exposed. Instead it's a plain old slider. Motorola keeps things fairly compact, with a 3.1-inch touchscreen. With only 480 x 320 pixels, the display isn't the most detailed or rich you'll find, but in my hands on time with the device, I hardly noticed the low pixel count. The Motorola Motoblur interface still looked colorful and detailed on the Motorola Flipside's screen, even under the harsh red light's at Motorola's CTIA event.
Like the rest of Motorola's new Android devices, the Flipside aims for a lower-end market than the mightier Droid phones. The phone uses a 3 megapixel camera, and it runs the older, Android 2.1 operating system. That means no Flash support until this phone gets an upgrade to Froyo.
The Motorola Flipside felt solid in the hand. It doesn't feel as dense or impervious as the metallic Droid phones, but it doesn't feel cheap like a feature phone. It's a little thick for tossing into a slim pocket, but it's not a large phone at all. I didn't get a chance to test the phone's CrystalTalk features, but I've used CrystalTalk on other Motorola phones, and it's always resulted in great call quality.
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