Recently, Motorola Company has released a kind of smart phone called back-flipping as its first Android handset. Many customers reflect that it is so odd that they cannot master it. Why odd? Well, it has a unique form factor in its back-flipping keyboard. That oddity aside, the Back flips is a much better effort from Motorola when compared to the Cliq and the Devour — at least as far as the hardware is concerned. If you’re an AT&T customer and have been longing for an Android handset, there are a few problems you should focus.

The first, at 4.7 ounces the Motorola MB300 back flip has a satisfying pocket weight, and it’s slightly cramped 3.1-inch touch screen. In addition, the back flips reveal an exposed QWERTY keyboard. The phone opens like a reverse clamshell, and once you swing the keyboard around through 180 degrees, it’s facing you, resting beneath the screen. And, get this — hidden away on the back of the touch screen is a small navigational touchpad (called the “Backtrack”) used for scrolling and selecting menu items.

Despite its running an older version of Google’s Android OS (1.5), all the bread-and-butter phone features make cameos on the Back flips and perform as expected. Unfortunately, running more than a handful of these widgets simultaneously proves problematic. Not only does the Backflip’s 528-MHz processor start to get sluggish, but the on-screen presentation of simultaneously updated feeds from Face book/Twitter/E-mail/Text/Weather/RSS is of location-aware, real-time data. It’s just too much.

Motorola attempts to address this by offering multiple home screens (accessible via left- and right-finger whisks), but there’s only so much one can do with 3.1 inches. Although hardly great at presenting data, the Back flips icon-driven interface does offer a silver lining. With the right widget combination (and savvy placement), we were able to get a snapshot of every social facet of our lives on one screen.
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