Motorola Razr Mobile phone and its Folding Screen Bring Phone Design Back to the Future

Motorola has officially announced Motorola Razr its much-rumored modern spin on the iconic flip phone. The 2019 Razr keeps the same general form factor but replaces the T9 keypad and small LCD with a 6.2-inch foldable plastic OLED panel and Android 9 Pie. It’ll cost $1,499 when it arrives in January 2020.

By today’s smartphone standards, the original Motorola Razr phone is primitive. At the time it debuted in the early 2000s, however, the ultra-thin clamshell phone’s metallic build, electroluminescent keyboard, and long battery life came close to mobile phone nirvana. It even gave a satisfying snap when you shut it.

The company announced the new device Wednesday at a press event in Los Angeles. As first reported in early 2019 by The Wall Street Journal, this new Razr has a flexible display. This allows it to fold closed like an OG Razr, then unfold to become a touchscreen smartphone with a 6.2-inch diagonal. It’s called, simply, the Motorola Razr, and it runs on Google’s Android 9 Pie operating system.

If the $2,000 Samsung Galaxy Fold is the foldable phone for early adopters who want to show off their wealth and sophistication, the Motorola Razr could be a foldable phone best suited for the rest of us  or at least for those of us comfortable with spending $1,500 on a phone. For reference, the 512GB iPhone 11 Pro Max costs roughly the same price. It converts to about £1,170 or AU$2,200.

The Razr will run Android 9 Pie as its operating system, powered by a Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 710 processor. The chip has eight computing cores running at 2.2 GHz, and is paired with 6 gigabytes of RAM along with 128 gigabytes of onboard storage. According to Motorola, the Razr should get the average user “a full-day of use,” but the company would not further elaborate on that claim.

Open up the device, though, and a 6.2-inch OLED display unfolds. The 21:9 screen has a resolution of 2142 x 876. It boasts excellent contrast and deep blacks, as OLEDs often do. Motorola wouldn’t disclose who it partnered with to create this display, but the company says it has developed plastic OLEDS since 2011.

The core of the phone is, of course, the display. It’s a 6.2-inch 21:9 plastic OLED panel that folds in half along the horizontal axis. Unfolded, it’s not dramatically bigger than any other modern phone, and the extra height is something that the Android interface and apps adapt to far better than a tablet-size screen. The screen does have a notch on top for a speaker and camera and a curved edge on the bottom, which takes a bit of getting used to, but after a minute or two, you barely notice it.

Motorola refused to go into detail about how it’s testing the phones, seemingly trying to avoid Samsung’s hubristic claim that each Fold phone could safely be folded 200,000 times, but it did say “we didn’t bring the Razr to market until we knew it was ready.” Motorola said it will not be putting any warnings in the device’s packaging to caution people to be careful with how they handle the device, as Samsung did when it relaunched the Fold.

Globally, the Razr will also go on preorder in select European countries as early as December, with a January sales date. Australia, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and select Asian markets will also carry the phone.