The overlay is 'enhanced' MotoBlur, building on the UI placed on the Motorola Dext - which basically integrated social network contacts into your phone book and provides a stream of status updates and Tweets on the home screen as 'Happenings'.

The enhanced part is actually pretty good, with the Happenings improved to allow you to only see streams of information from specific networks or even just certain people, which is much better than the information overload from the original version.

The music player is now 'connected' as well, which basically means when you're playing tracks the Motorola Flipout can work out what they are and display the lyrics as well - we think this shows quite clearly the demographic this phone is aimed at.

However, the enhanced MotoBlur does pack one really handy feature, in that you get seven home screens and whenever you drag and drop widgets onto them you can also re-size them to get more information on the screen for the elements you want to see.

The Motorola Flipout only has a 2.8-inch QVGA screen, which means both space and resolution are at a premium - we're looking forward to seeing enhanced MotoBlur on larger and more powerful devices in the future.

However at least it packs a capacitive screen, and this will whip along at a fairly decent rate under the finger - just don't expect to be blown away with what's displayed on the phone.

The internet is also a pretty low resolution - we were unable to get a 3G signal to test the connection and rendering speeds, but we'd imagine it would be pretty speedy compared to other operating systems by just having the standard WebKit-based browser on there.

Messaging, as we mentioned earlier, is a pretty nice affair - not only is there a full keyboard but there are also a number of ways to communicate with your buddies.

While there doesn't appear to be any option to get corporate email on the device (we may be wrong as this was just a test unit) you can easily send messages through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and even, mystifyingly, Bebo.

We like options, and the Motorola Flipout certainly has them.

The camera on the phone isn't much to write home about though - a 3.1MP effort with no flash and not the best photos in the world doesn't really set our world on fire - the iPhone 3G even has a better camera than this, and that's only 2MP.

Overall, we're mildly impressed with the Motorola Flipout - it's the sort of thing that is cool enough until you find out that it's going to cost £30 a month or something.

Essentially, this will either be around £20 a month and a free phone, thus making it a great option for the budget market, or more expensive and therefore a low-spec phone that can't mix it with the big boys.