An elegant white rectangle, the Helio Kickflip ($250 list) could be a style icon on the order of the RAZR. Unfortunately, hideously buggy software forces me to warn you away from this phone, at least during May and June of 2006. Helio says it's fixing the software soon. When it does, I will revisit this review.

The software bugs are unfortunate, because this phone sure is pretty. It's a little heavy, at 4.5 ounces and 3.9 by 2 by 1 inches, but the hinge snaps open automatically with a firm touch, and it's tremendous fun to feel the kick of the screen flying into place. The number buttons are tight but big enough, the dedicated music and camera buttons on the outside work well, and the screen is gorgeous. If all you want to do is watch the logo flip up and down while swinging the snappy hinge back and forth, go ahead, buy one.

Unfortunately, the Kickflip's bugs affect even basic calling functions. During outgoing calls there's an unacceptable hiss in the earpiece, and the battery runs down after less than 3 hours of talk time. That's not good.

The phone has a 2-megapixel camera, but there's no way to get the photos out of it because it saves them in a bizarre, nonstandardized format, even when you transfer them to a microSD memory card. If you try to send them to yourself, they shrink down to 640-by-480. The phone also has a music/video player, but I could never get the phone to play MP3s off a memory card, though I could get it to crash a lot while trying to do so.

There were other, smaller bugs that were pretty annoying. If you're in an application that uses the phone's soft keys (such as the video player), and you flip the phone closed, the app keeps running with the soft key labels pointing to no buttons you can possibly press on the closed phone. Helio's HOT application, which brings news headlines to the phone's home screen, disables the phone's menu button, making it useless. To cap it all, the phone gets uncomfortably warm when left plugged in.

It seems to me the 320-by-240 screen is too good for Helio's video content. It is a big, bright display, but the video looks bad. A downloaded music video looked almost impressionistically blocky. The phone has TV-video out, which I couldn't test as my model didn't come with the right cable—and anyway, both the 176-by-144 videos taken with the phone's camera and the blocky music video I downloaded would look even more awful on a TV.

Helio plans to update the Kickflip's software in June to improve sound quality, battery life, and overall stability and functionality, though Helio is unwisely selling it now. Right now, anyone with half an ounce of sense should buy the Hero; if they want to try the Helio experience, and stay away from the buggy Kickflip.