This phone’s shot doesn’t flip as much as the name suggests.  The flipping you’d see is from the cover.  After opening up the cover you twist it around at the hinge, at the maximum of 180 degrees, to show off the 2.2-inch display when you clip the cover back.  This automatically makes the phone into a camera, a 3 MP one.  With the cover at another degree angle it can also act and look just like a camcorder.  Just like most digital cameras these days you connect a printer via PictBridge to print your images, or Bluetooth, which you can also use for wireless head or earphone listening, and for hands-free calling. On the hi-res display your wallpaper is the “living” kind, that animates.  For road-guiding you have GPS.

This new phone, the Iris, from HTC, doubly rocks, in more sense of the word. On the rubbery-feel front it has not one but two rockers, one on each side of the navigation pad, for soft keys. The call and cancel-call keys sit next to them, on opposite edges. Besides all this is a full-QWERTY keyboard. The display is only 2.4 inches but it’s laid out in landscape mode. A little disappointing here when you cannot touch the screen for applications and menus, because it is running only the Standard version of Windows Mobile 6. A 400 Mhz processor makes for fast running of applications. No surprise it has Wifi, Bluetooth, a 2 MP camera and even a GPS.

It might be pronounced slim for Samsung’s SLM but it is not as ultra slim as its Ultra range. That range measures in millimetres whereas this one is in inches, about half-inch or so. Anyway, Samsung is not promoting its slimness, rather its music downloading capability. It will be able to download directly from Napster’s mobile service, for MP3s, and also ringtones and wallpapers. And it’ll be at a roaring speed as the SLM connects to 3G. The camera sitting on top, on the flip cover’s hinge, shoots at 2 MP. The key pad design reminds one rather of the RAZR, all flat and flushed keys.