Motorola's Hint was made for social butterflies

Today, the wraps came off the new Motorola Hint QA30 cell phone. The handset's boxy design looks a lot like the wide iPod nano and reminds me of the trendier LG Lotus and Samsung's Cleo flip phones, except this one is a vertical slider phone.

It seems Motorola is trying to appeal to the text messaging social butterflies "who are used to having several conversations at once" with threaded text and instant messaging. As you can see from the pictures, the fat little phone hides a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard, which is a nice surprise considering the size of this device.

The handset itself may not look like much, but it sports a 2.5 inch color widescreen display, Bluetooth, an MP3 Player, speakerphone, 2-megapixel camera with video recorder, microSD slot, and Wi-Fi. It will be available through Alltel starting November 28th for the low price of $100 with a two-year contract and a $50 mail-in rebate.