Abhinav Lal

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Posted on 06-10-2010

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Motorola has unveiled six new Android phones, hoping to continue its success on the platform. With these six, Motorola has overshot its promise of delivering 10 Android handsets by the end of 2010, if you include the Charm, Droid 2, Droid X, Cliq, Devour, BackFlip and Defy. This also means that if Motorola starts paying Microsoft for each Android phone sold, as HTC is forced to do with the recently signed licensing agreement, it might regret its love for the platform it currently endorses wholeheartedly.

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None of the prices for the six phones have been announced yet, but as for availability, they are all going to be hitting U.S. carriers (with the exception of the Motorola Spice) in Q4 2010. The Citrus, Bravo and Spice phones are lower-end Android 2.1 smartphones, aiming to offer wide functionality at an affordable price point. Let us take a look at them, along with the Droid Pro, FlipSide and FlipOut phones:

Flipside	Flipout	Bravo
Citrus	Droid Pro	Spice

Droid Pro
Motorola introduced this phone last evening at an event in San Francisco, integrating the Android 2.2 Froyo platform with a BlackBerry QWERTY form factor. Sure to raise a lot of eyebrows and evidently part of a move to take on the premier business phone manufacturer – RIM – the Motorola Droid Pro QWERTY phone also sports a 3.1-inch capacitive touchscreen. Continuing the business trend, the phone will also give its users the ability to read/edit Microsoft Office documents, and, remote wiping of data onboard and on the memory card. The ability to track changes in Office documents is missing though…Motorola also announced that they will soon be rolling out a new feature that will allow users to encrypt the data on their phone as well.

Providing support for businessmen (and women) on the move, the phone has radios for both CDMA, GSM, and their 3G variants. Check out the full specs on the next page, compared to the other newly announced phones.

Motorola Citrus
A full-touch phone, the Motorola Citrus candybar features Android 2.1 with the MotoBlur skin/customization. The phone also features the Motorola’s unique control interface, the BackTrack, which allows users to scroll and navigate with a touch sensitive tracker on the backside of the phone, without obstructing the screen. The phone features Bing Search and Maps as the default, and, will also give its users an eco-friendly feel good factor with the claim that it is manufactured with 25 percent recycled plastic, and contains no PVC or BFR. Check out its other specifications on the next page.

Motorola Bravo
Like the Citrus, the Motorola Bravo is a full-touch phone with Android 2.1 and MotoBlur. It has a much slightly larger screen at 3.7-inches, and, can display up to 16M colours. Featuring Wi-Fi with DLNA, the Motorola Bravo sports 512MB RAM, and a 3.2MP autofocus camera. With its large screen, it will be ideal for media consumption, as well as web-browsing, though full Flash support is not available with Éclair. Check out its other specifications on the next page.

Motorola Spice
Developed entirely by the Motorola Brazil team, this low-cost Android 2.1 phone features a vertical sliding QWERTY keyboard, and also gives its users the BackTrack control interface, just like the Citrus. Touting a 3MP camera, 3-inch QVGA capacitive touchscreen, and some solid battery life, the Motorola Spice is all set to be a killer inexpensive messaging/social networking phone with access to the Android Market. The phone will be launched first in Latin America before making its way to the rest of the world. Another major feature of the device is called ‘Flashback’, a native application that collates your calls, messages and photos in chronological order. Check out its other specifications on the next page.

Motorola Flipout
Certainly unconventional, the Motorola Flipout features a swivelling five-row QWERTY keypad and a just as unconventional square form factor. Running on Android 2.1 with the MotoBlur skin, the Flipout has a 2.8-inch screen, 512MB RAM, and a 600MHz processor. Check out more specifications on the next page.

Motorola Flipside
Not too unlike its namesake, the Flipout, the Flipside will feature a more conventional horizontal sliding QWERTY keyboard with a 3.1-inch screen, and will also run on Android 2.1 with the MotoBlur skin. With 256MB RAM, the phone might not be as snappy as the Flipout, but will probably cheaper as well.

Check out detailed specifications of all six phones on the next page....