If you had used the Motorola Razr in the good old feature phone days, then this news must be of interest to you. Motorola, now under Lenovo management, is resurrecting the Moto Razr as a foldable smartphone with a vertical folding mechanism as against the book-like horizontal folding designs seen so far. The Moto Razr was an iconic phone and possibly the company is trying to take advantage of that with this new foldable Moto Razr smartphone.
The main display screen is a 6.2-inch OLED panel with an aspect ratio of 21:9, when unfolded. Motorola has created a strong hinge with the support of Lenovo and the phone can be fully stretched to yield a flat panel. The screen is uniform and doesn’t show it has a fold in between. Motorola claims it knows how to handle OLED panels which it has been fitting on its devices for over 8 years. There is a secondary screen of 2.7 inches when folded, which is an LCD display and has limited utility like displaying alerts, etc.
Continuing with the form factor, some of the original elements like the round bottom and the prominent chin that used to house the physical home button in the old Razr feature phone have been retained. In this foldable device, Motorola has provided a fingerprint sensor. The bottom of this is used to house the speaker grill and the USB-C type port for charging.
Motorola has however been quite economical with the main specifications of the device. The processor chosen by Motorola is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 710SoC. Similarly, the camera section has a single 16MP sensor. The company has explained away these by saying that the choice of the processor had to do with the battery life and they would have had to change the whole design all over to accommodate a larger battery. The same reason is being attributed to the limited camera section as the design could not accommodate a larger camera setup.
With all these limitations, the Moto Razr foldable device is being priced at $1,500. The phone has just been announced. The pre-orders start in the last week of December and the physical deliveries start only January 2020. It has been revealed that the device will be first launched only in the US and that too through Verizon. There is no clarity if one can pick an unlocked phone from outside as well.
One has to wait till then to know how the market reacts to this foldable Moto Razr with moderate specs and a high price.