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The Motorola Backflip is like the Dext but with a horrific back injury. It’s an Android-powered smart phone with a slide-out Qwerty keyboard, and it’s got similar rounded looks, but its screen also flips back at an angle.
With the display at a jaunty angle, in what Motorola calls ‘tabletop mode’, the Backflip is perfect for watching videos or for use as a digital picture frame, or perhaps for keeping on your bedside table as an alarm clock.
Motorola has also stuck a touch-sensitive panel on the back side of the display, so you can scroll through Web sites and emails without blocking the home screen with unsightly finger-meat.
The Backflip has Motorola’s tweaked version of Android, Motoblur, which
merges your amorphous blob of contacts from Facebook and MySpace with
the address book on your phone. It also brings updates, such as tweets
and status changes, into the stream of incoming emails and text messages that
invade your life day and night.
Motoblur also includes a free service for managing your phone online. You can track down a lost phone with GPS, or back up your phone,
including your Android apps.
The Backflip runs a slightly older version of Android, 1.5, which is still going strong on phones like the HTC Hero. It’s too bad that Motorola couldn’t match its own Motorola Milestone, which runs version 2.0 of Android, but it’s likely that the company couldn’t get Motoblur ported to the latest version quickly enough for the Backflip to benefit.
The Backflip has a 79mm (3.1-inch) screen, a 5-megapixel camera with an LED photo light, and comes with a 2GB microSD card. It’s coming to the UK early this year.
