Given the amount of cool tech that was seen at CES 2010, it’s now pretty safe to say that the future Robert Zemeckis showed us in Back to the Future Part II is quickly approaching. It certainly won’t be long before we’re eating dehydrated pizzas under hydroponic plants, getting fired via fax (wait, that was the ‘90s), or playing video games like big kids – hands free (ah, right, Project Natal).
Okay, so the Motorola BACKFLIP isn’t as ground-breaking as a number of items seen at CES (for innovation on par with AVATAR you’ll have to look to any number of 3-D gadgets such as Panasonic’s line of TVs, LG’s or Sony’s 3-D Blu-ray players, the Alex eReader, or the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid laptop), but it’s at least innovative in its physical design.
Essentially, there are two unique things about the design. There is a third thing, but it hardly seems worthwhile mentioning the fact that when the device is opened at 90-degrees it serves as its own stand and, thereby, saves you from buying one piece of third-party crap. Damn it; I just mentioned it didn’t I? First, the Motorola BACKFLIP literally does a back flip when you open it up to use the physical keyboard. When the Android smartphone is closed, the keyboard is exposed on the rear, but Motorola claims that it’s durable enough to tolerate some rough play. Second, Motorola has also included what it calls the Backtrack on the back of the screen (the BACKFLIP has to be open to use it), which functions like a trackpad and allows you to scroll and navigate through such things as photos, menus, and home screens.
Undressing the Motorola BACKFLIP
The Motorola BACKFLIP comes with the Android 1.5 operating system, which you’ll be able to upgrade to 2.1. While a carrier hasn’t been officially announced for the quad-band GSM BACKFLIP, it does support AT&Ts 3G bands 850/1900/2100MHz). It also supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.
The 3.1-inch 480 x 320 HVGA touchscreen does a nice job with displaying the full HTML browser and the images taken by the phone’s 5-megapixel camera. There’s also an accelerometer and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Capacity on the BACKFLIP is standard, coming with a 2GB microSD card and being expandable to 32GB.
Motorola has stated that the BACKFLIP will be available in Q1 2010, but plan rates and pricing have not yet been released.
