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I dropped my Iphone 3G about 6 weeks ago, completely shattering the screen. I had been thinking about trying something different when my contract was up, and I saw that AT&T was finally getting its first Android phone, the Motorola Backflip, I picked one up.
The phone was 199 dollars rebate, so my total cost of ownership will be 99 dollars after the rebate comes back, which I think is very reasonable for a phone with this many features.
Physically, the phone is very sturdy and good looking, with a metal and plastic body, and a scratch resistant gorilla glass screen. It has a 3.5 mm headphone jack, volume rocker, on/off/lock switch, and a camera button. It has a micro USB slot for charging and syncing, which is thankfully becoming standard on most new phone.
The part that most people love or hate about the phone is the backflip feature. When closed, the keyboard and screen are on the outside of the phone, the opposite of most clamshell phones. The keyboard seems very sturdy and I doubt it will break down over time. Many people have complained that the exposed keyboard will take a beating, but so do blackberry and other candybar style phones. I have only had the phone 2 weeks, so I cannot say what the long term viability is, but it looks great so far.
You can type on the screen in landscape or portrait mode if you want, or flip the phone open to use the truly huge keyboard for typing longer messages. I have short thick finger, and this is the best physical keyboard I have ever used on a cell phone. The only think that could be improved would be to give the keys more travel, it can sometimes be hard to tell by feel if you have fully pressed a key when you are typing quickly.
The on-screen keyboard is not a good as the one on my iphone, but the addition of the physical keyboard more than makes up for this for me.
The screen is 3.1 inches, which is a bit small. Everything is very clear and sharp, however, and the touch sensitivity from the capacitive screen is excellent, except for the very bottom edge of the screen when the keyboard is flipped out.
The onboard camera is 5 MP with autofocus and flash, and it takes acceptable, cell phone quality pictures and videos. Nothing to get excited about, but the pictures are better than any other phone I have used. Many have complained about the odd placement of the camera in the corner of the keyboard, but after taking one picture of my index finger accidentally covering the lens, the camera has been fine.
When I first got the phone, the battery life was awful. I could only get 6 to 8 hours of use before the battery went dead. After digging through all the settings, I found out that all the features used in monitoring email and social networks were set to be very aggressive in downloading new content. If enough people are interested, I will create a guide to all the settings I tweaked so that I can now get nearly 2 days of battery from the phone, while still feeling fully connect to email, Twitter and Facebook.
Lastly I will cover the software on the phone. I had never used Android before this phone, but I had used Windows Mobile 5 and 6, Iphone, Blackberry and Symbian in various phones over the years.
After using the Backflip for about 2 weeks I can say android feels like a cross between Windows Mobile and the Iphone OS. The core functionality is about 70-80 percent as easy to use as the Iphone OS, but still gives me a lot of the tinkerabiltiy of Windows Mobile. The android market is easy to use and has a lot of apps for many different functions. Obviously it cannot compete with the Iphone app store for numbers and flexibility, but I have been able to find free apps for nearly every feature I used on my iphone. A few that I could not find a good Android equivalent for are the Amazon Kindle app, and the iphone music player, but I have a Zune and a Kindle, so I don’t miss them that much.
In summary, the Backflip is an excellent smartphone marred by a few flaws that could easily be fixed with better PR for the phone, and a few simple software tweaks. There has been a lot of bashing aimed at this phone and AT&T for the inability to install non-market apps, releasing the phone with Android 1.5 instead of a newer version of the software, and the decision to make Yahoo the default search engine on the phone.
In my experience, none of these things affected my day to day use. I found plenty of 1.5 compatible apps in the market hat did everything I needed to do, and AT&T and Motorola have said an OS upgrade is on the way. To get around the Yahoo default search option, I removed the search widget from the home screen and added a shortcut to the Google home page, simple solution. When the phone is upgrade to a newer version of Android, Google maps with voice navigation will be available, which should silence another batch of complaints about the phone.