Hands On With Freetel's Crazy Android Flip Phone

LAS VEGAS—Flip phones aren't dead. I'm not talking about feature phones, although they aren't dead either. I'm talking about the flip form factor, which pop and snap.

Here at CES, Japanese phone maker Freetel showed off the Musashi, a flip Android phone that puts fully Google-compatible Android into a traditional flip device.

The Musashi came from Japan's ongoing love for flips, especially among older users.

"If you reach a certain age you don't want to change, and why should you?" Freetel president Ian Chapman-Banks said. "You can keep the keypad but be able to Skype or WhatsApp and be able to get on with your life."

The Android 5.1 phone has two 800-by-480, 4-inch LCD touch screens, one on the front and one inside the flip. You can use the phone closed, just by manipulating the front screen, or flip it open. Open, it's quite long, but it has a full phone keypad with cursor pad, and yes, you can text using the keypad. The phone runs on a Mediatek processor, and it has dual SIM card slots plus a MicroSD card slot and a removable battery.

I couldn't say much about how the phone is to use because the software was way too early and buggy. The main camera is surprisingly sharp, and the selfie camera only works when the flip is open, as it's on the inside of the flip. The physical keypad has large buttons; they're a little flat, but clicky enough. Freetel said the phone's exact specs were still subject to change.

The Musashi will come to the U.S. by June and will probably cost $249, Chapman-Banks said. It will be fully compatible with the T-Mobile and AT&T networks.

The Musashi is only the oddest of a pretty rich lineup Freetel is bringing to the U.S., though. The Priori 3 is a small, $99 unlocked LTE phone for AT&T and T-Mobile, while the $389 Kiwami is the first phone we've seen with Mediatek's powerful Helio X20 processor. The Kiwami also has a 6-inch, 2,560-by-1,440 screen and 21-megapixel camera. The Miyabi is a major competitor for the new Huawei Honor 5x at $199, with a sharp, rectangular glass back, a Mediatek processor, and a 13-megapixel rear camera.

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Chapman-Banks explained that Freetel was founded in Japan as a sort of "Uniqlo of phones," offering fashionable-looking devices for lower than the average $300 in monthly spending money that most Japanese office workers get.

In the U.S., the company is aiming to start by establishing credibility in the unlocked market, which Chapman-Banks estimates as totalling 3 million units a year right now; it'll then potentially move to prepaid carriers, which are absolutely looking for $99 entry-level LTE phones and classier $199 LTE devices.

Freetel's handsets, like some of the new Blu phones we're going to see tomorrow, are dependent on the new line of chipsets from Mediatek, which has had breakthroughs this year in building LTE modems that U.S. carriers support. While Mediatek has had some low-end success on T-Mobile, the company's chipsets are now working towards clearance from all four national carriers, company executives told me earlier today.