Tech
That time Motorola put a keyboard on the back of a phone
Physical keyboards on phones aren’t really a thing anymore, and that’s a shame. Not because they were better than virtual keyboards, but because they allowed for some truly strange phone designs. Take the Motorola Backflip, for example.
The form factor of the Motorola Backflip was essentially just a horizontal flip phone. However, it worked in the complete opposite way from every other flip phone. You didn’t flip it open to access the display and keyboard on the inside. The good stuff was all on the outside.
Flip phone, but reversed
Previously, I wrote about the Motorola Flipout, which was a compact square phone with a keyboard that swiveled out. That was not the strangest phone Motorola launched in 2010, though. Three months earlier, the Motorola Backflip launched on AT&T.
At this time, Motorola was trying not to be a one-hit wonder in the Android space. The DROID line was massively successful for Verizon, but the company was throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall on other carriers. Hence the Flipout and Backflip both launching on AT&T just a few months apart.
The Backflip was the second phone—behind the Motorola Cliq—to feature the company’s “MOTOBLUR” software. It was a heavily modified version of Android with a deep emphasis on social media and widgets. And this was all displayed on a 3.1-inch screen with 320×480 resolution, so there wasn’t actually much room for it.
The Backflip launched with Android 1.5 Cupcake and was upgraded to Android 2.1 Eclair five months after launch. That was the last update the Backflip would receive, though. The phone was discontinued by AT&T in January 2011, less than a year after release. This was not uncommon for the time.
What made it weird?
Obviously, the star of the show was the reverse flip design. While most phones that flip open put the display and keyboard on the inside, protected while closed, the Backflip had everything on the outside.
When fully closed, it was a rectangular slab with a keyboard on the back. Your fingers rested on the keyboard when you were holding it. With the phone open, it more or less worked like a regular slide-out keyboard phone—landscape screen at the top, landscape keyboard below.
The weirdness didn’t end with the reverse flip design. Behind the display was a touch-sensitive trackpad called the “Backtrack.” The idea is you could use the Backtrack to swipe around home screens and scroll through lists without blocking the relatively small display. It was a cool concept, but the location made it uncomfortable to use.
Oh, and you may be wondering about the camera placement. Was it behind the display, requiring you to flip the phone open every time you snapped a photo? Nope, it was a part of the keyboard. That meant you could easily use it for selfies, but it also meant you were constantly smudging it with fingerprints.
All in all, the Backflip was actually a solid phone that received mostly positive reviews. The reverse flip design was weird, but it wasn’t too weird. In reality, it was very similar to many other phones with landscape physical keyboards. But like the Flipout, it was an underpowered phone that got bogged down by MOTOBLUR.
What did we learn?
The lessons learned from the Motorola Flipout are essentially the same for the Backflip. Both of these devices attempted to put a spin on a tried-and-true form factor. It turns out that a slider mechanism is just the best way to conceal a keyboard, and the phone itself has to be good enough to stand on its own without the gimmicks.
The Backflip and the Flipout were underpowered phones with laggy software. There wasn’t a clever mechanism in the world that would have improved the experience. Still, I love these phones just the same for trying to be different, and I miss the variety in Android phones of this era.
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