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Motorola is expected to launch an Android-running smartphone called the Flipout in the United States this June.
According to several reports, the square, twisty phone features a 2.8-inch square display that twists into position over a square, full qwerty keypad.
According to Gizmodo Brazil, Android 2.1 will be on board, along with Motorola’s MotoBlur syncing feature, a 700MHz processor, 512MB of ROM and 256MB of RAM memory. The petite twister is also said to include GPS and a 3.1-megapixel camera.
Color options will reportedly extend to, at minimum, black, green and pink. No details have emerged about a carrier partner or pricing.
In January, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said the company had plans to release at least 20 devices during 2010, and that the profitability Motorola sees with Android phones is “meaningfully better than our traditional portfolio, our legacy portfolio.”
Jha also revealed that – like HTC did with the Nexus One – Motorola plans to launch “at least one” direct-to-consumer device with Google, the maker of the Android operating system.
The plan to embrace Android is so far paying off for Motorola.
“Motorola is repositioning itself as a smartphone player, centered around the Android OS, and with its global smartphone market share almost doubling quarter-on-quarter to 4 percent [in the fourth quarter of 2009], the initiative has gotten off to a positive start,” analyst Neil Mawston, with Strategy Analytics, wrote in a Jan. 29 report.
More than just a good start, the Motorola Droid, which is currently exclusive to Verizon Wireless in the United States, has enjoyed strong, ongoing sales. During Verizon’s first-quarter earnings call, the carrier revealed that it had sold even more Droids during the first quarter of 2010 than during its holiday-timed launch during the fourth quarter of 2009.
The popularity of the Android OS in the United States has grown to the point that there are now more devices running Android in the U.S. than Apple’s wildly popular iPhone OS.
According to a May 10 report from NPD Group, the Android OS gained 28 percent of the market in the first quarter of 2010, compared to the iPhone’s 21 percent. Each trailed behind Research In Motion, however, as its BlackBerry handsets accounted for 36 percent of the market.