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Motorola Flipout Android Phone for $99 on Vodafone Prepaid at Dick Smith

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Another sub $100 Android phone, but with an interesting 'twist'.

It's unusual swivel design makes way for a qwerty keyboard underneath, and the entire phone is very square-ish in shape. Makes it pretty compact in size at 67x67mm, but pretty thick at 17mm.

Pros
- 512Mb RAM
- 600MHz Cortex-A8 processor, PowerVR SGX530 GPU
- 5 row qwerty keyboard
- Compact size
- Motoblur 1.5
- Capacitive touch screen
- Multi-touch
- Comes with 2GB microSD

Cons
- Android 2.1 only (no official upgrade to 2.2/2.3)
- 2.8" screen
- Chunky (17mm thick)
- Crap camera
- May cause headaches, nausea, vomiting (i.e. locked to vodafone)

More specs

I think it compares quite well to other phones in this price range (Huawei X1 for $89, Huawei Ideos U8150 for $79, Huawei U8300 for $49) in that it has 512Mb RAM and a slightly faster processor and GPU. In fact, it has the same processor and GPU as Motorola's old flagship the Milestone/Droid, and twice as much RAM. Has the same tiny 2.8" screen as the Huawei U8150 which means the physical qwerty keyboard is very useful.

Found this whilst looking for a cheap, temporary replacement for my current phone for which I'm waiting for parts to come in. Only problem is that I use liveconnected, and can't find anywhere cheap to unlock it?

It's in-store only however a brief search says there's plenty of stores in most states which have them.

Related Stores

Dick Smith / Kogan
Dick Smith / Kogan
Marketplace

closed Comments

  • +16

    May cause headaches, nausea, vomiting (i.e. locked to vodafone)

    +1 just for that! :)

  • +2

    If this were easily unlockable and you could tolerate the overly "showy" look of it, I'd definitely pick this as a great low end Android device. The Cortex A8 shouldn't really struggle with many things and they generally overclock very well (up to 1GHz).

  • wow that is an ugly phone. Good price though. +1 nice find

    • I agree, it's definitely not my style!

      As a temporary phone however or maybe one for the kids/a first android user it could be useful.

      It seems the styling of most phones in this price range does leave a lot to be desired though. Surely it can't be hard to design a cheap phone with a nice, simple design ala HTC Wildfire.

  • -6

    This has been $99 for ages…

    I'm out of the loop with the latest phones, and held off posting this as it has some very ordinary reviews…

  • +4

    I bought one of these phones 4 months ago outright and still use it BUT the battery life is shocking! Will not last 24hrs on standby and its been like that since day 1. Great small phone but battery is so terrible, charge from flat in the morning will not last until the next morning and im not a heavy user of calls/txt/apps (facebook etc). Nice phone but the battery lets it right down.

    • +1

      A good find OP - but this real-life review from glustar just stopped me from giving you the vote you deserve. A good example of the benefit of the OzB community at work.

      • +1

        Got one when kmart had them 4 same price.bought as secondary phone to play with.as gustar said,and my case as well battery life is poor.however good value for the price behind the $199 htc legend (if u you can find one)

    • Yep, Androids are notorious for their piss-poor battery life in general. Coupled with the Flipout's smaller 900mAh battery, it'd mean you will probably be charging your phone quite often.

      Have you tried using app-killers and using 2G only when you don't need the internet? It significantly increased my battery life, and I went from charging everyday to once every 2-3 days (with moderate usage).

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