Motorola Releases Two New Android Smartphones (NewsFactor)

Motorola is placing digit newborn bets on the open-source Android operative grouping with the promulgation of its Backflip and Devour smartphones. The uniquely fashioned Backflip began commerce finished AT&T Wireless New terminal week, and the Detour is today acquirable from Verizon Wireless.

The 3G/Wi-Fi Backflip, at $99 after channel and with a two-year contract, is gaining a aggregation of tending for its unequalled flip-out QWERTY keyboard, which AT&T has described as "an example alter fling design."

Big Selling Point — MOTOBLUR

By flipping the keyboard backward, the figure crapper be ordered up in tabletop fashion for perception to music, hunting at videos and photos, or performing as a digital signal clock. There's also a five-megapixel autofocus camera with diode flash, a flooded HTML browser, and AT&T's Backtrack. The traveler describes Backtrack as "a newborn artefact to holograph finished the web, texts, e-mails, and programme feeds," which the individual crapper do without impeding up the bag screen.

MOTOBLUR, acquirable on both the Backflip and the Devour, has also embellish a differentiating bourgeois for Motorola. It's a social-networking assist that streams the user's messages, posts, tweets, pictures and contacts so binary applications don't requirement to be opened.

Socially astir users crapper also beam programme messages to binary friends at erst finished binary apps. The ethnic aggregation is delivered automatically to customizable, springy widgets on the bag screen, where Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are synced together.

MOTOBLUR 'Somewhat Polarizing'

Avi Greengart, an shrink with business investigate concern Current Analysis, said Backflip's modify bourgeois and hyper-social MOTOBLUR module draw more tending from the cipher consumer than its ingest of Android.

The keyboard, he said, "opens the criminal way," and it "takes a lowercase instance to intend utilised to." But, he added, the benefits of this organisation allow a trackpad on the backwards of the keyboard, so a individual crapper manoeuver without impinging the screen, and the unequalled knowledge to unstoppered it central so that the smartphone stands up as an signal clock.

Greengart said he showed the sound to a pore assemble of teenagers, and they likeable its unequalled keyboard design. He also noted that MOTOBLUR is "somewhat polarizing," since it is a feature primarily for users who poverty to be "constantly bombarded by updates and connectivity" with their friends.

He praised the Devour's extruded metal housing as a "beautiful impact of art." The newborn Motorola model, with a flat sliding QWERTY keyboard and a trackpad incoming to the screen, also features MOTOBLUR. Greengart said the Devour is a beatific pick for Verizon customers who don't poverty to advise up to the carrier's much-publicized prototypal Android phone, Motorola's Droid.