Fifteen years ago the Motorola RAZR was among the most popular mobile phones in the world. It closed in on itself, “clamshell”, and when opened it was the thinnest cell phone ever put on the market. In a short time the RAZR became one of the greatest commercial successes in the field of telephony: 130 million were sold. The arrival of iPhones and other smartphones in 2007 changed everything, however, making cell phones with keys and who made them seem obsolete, some of the biggest brands in the world like Motorola, RIM (BlackBerry) and Nokia. Now, a few years after its demise, Motorola has resurrected the RAZR for a rather ambitious – and expensive – nostalgia operation that it hopes will increase interest in smartphones with foldable screens.
The new RAZR is aesthetically reminiscent of the original model of fifteen years ago: it has the same clamshell mechanism, but instead of revealing a small screen and keyboard, when opened it shows a large touchscreen that covers a good part of the internal surface. The screen is flexible and folds back on itself when the smartphone is closed for storage in your pocket. On the outside there is a smaller touchscreen that can be used to check notifications and adjust some phone settings, without having to open it every time.
The new RAZR isn't the first smartphone with a foldable screen to go on sale, but so far the promise of phones with flexible screens hasn't gotten the manufacturers very far and has been the cause of some embarrassment. A few months ago, for example, Samsung presented Galaxy Fold, its first mobile phone with a folding screen, but unlike the RAZR it opens like a book. It was supposed to be the biggest news in the industry in recent times, but it turned out to be a half failure.
Even before the Galaxy Fold went on sale, some reporters who were reviewing it found that it took very little to damage the foldable screen. The specks of dust easily ended up in the locking mechanism, damaging the electrical contacts of the touchscreen and other components. Samsung had to postpone the sale of its phone, which costs over 2 thousand euros, until after the summer, pending modification of the locking system, adding protections to better isolate it and prevent dust and impurities from damaging it.
Huawei, another big smartphone maker, has long announced the Mate X, another folding screen smartphone, which was thought to go on sale this year. It is unclear when the new phone will be in stores, priced at over € 2,300.
To be honest, things have not gone much better for Motorola: the company initially hoped to put the new RAZR on sale during the summer, but had to revise its plans due to some delays. Its foldable smartphone will be sold in the United States starting in January, while the timing for it to go on sale in Europe is not yet known. However, we know that it will cost at least 1,500 euros, a rather high price, especially when compared to the other smartphones produced by Motorola, appreciated for being cheap.
Motorola has been around for 90 years, has brought some of the most important innovations in the mobile phone industry (including the world's first portable cell phone), yet today it's not one of the first brands that come to mind when you think of smartphones. The company has had a rather troubled history, especially in the years when Apple and then Google changed telephony forever.
Arriving late in the nascent smartphone industry, Motorola lost about $ 4.3 billion between 2007 and 2009, necessitating its restructuring. In 2011 it was split into two independent companies: Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions. Motorola Mobility was sold to Google in 2012, when the Silicon Valley company planned to compete directly with Apple by producing its own smartphones with the Android operating system. Within a few years it became apparent to Google that it was better to challenge Apple via established Android smartphone manufacturers, such as Samsung, and in 2014 Motorola Mobility was sold to Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo.
The new RAZR was developed and manufactured by Motorola Mobility, which continues to be a subsidiary of Lenovo. Thanks to subsequent internal reorganizations, and a significant downsizing, Motorola has recovered its own space in the smartphone sector (3 percent of the market), producing models that have often received very positive reviews. The Moto G7 is considered by many to be one of the best budget smartphones on the market today, with extremely positive reviews even on Amazon, where cheaper models sometimes don't get praise due to the promises they fail to deliver.
The new RAZR costs a lot more than a Moto G7, but Motorola is interested in showing what can be done in the nascent smartphone industry with foldable screens. Once opened, the RAZR's screen is 6.2 inches wide and has a different mechanism than the Galaxy Fold: according to the designers it should prove to be more durable and reliable. Its design and construction took about two years of work and the production of countless prototypes, with some failures in between.
With current technologies, folding screens are difficult to handle: they cannot be completely folded back on themselves, like a sheet of paper, otherwise they would break, and they are very delicate. The Galaxy Fold, which has an internal folding screen, uses a mechanism with a very wide hinge, which allows the display not to bend beyond the breaking angle, even if this results in having a decidedly bulky smartphone in your pocket. Huawei has chosen to keep the foldable screen on the outside of its Mate X, reducing the risk of breakage, because the screen never reaches too small an angle.
After numerous attempts and some broken screens, the designers of the new RAZR have managed to find a good compromise: the closed phone gives the idea that the screen is folded back on itself, while in reality the right space is kept inside to allow it to flex as much as possible. In the central part, the screen is free to move without being attached to the hinge, and this offers additional space to avoid stress that could damage it. Motorola says it has tested the new screen in numerous conditions, but only after it goes on sale will we know if the measures studied were sufficient to avoid the worst.
The new RAZR's external screen required less headache. It has a size of 2.7 inches and, as it was for the original models, it is mostly of service to see the latest news, incoming calls, messages and to quickly adjust some application settings. It can also be used to take selfies with the 16 megapixel camera, which also functions as the main camera when the smartphone is open.
It is unlikely that the new RAZR will become as global a success as the original version released 15 years ago, also because many modern-day buyers were too young when the first model came out to remember it, or were not really born. For this Motorola will try to move by combining both the nostalgia effect and the novelty, focusing more on the latter to attract new customers.
The biggest obstacle could be that of price, considering that with lower costs you can buy Apple's iPhones, Google's Pixels, Samsung's most prestigious Galaxy and Huawei's mobile phones, all considered among the best smartphones in circulation. However, the new RAZR could incentivize the design of smartphones in new formats, which respond to the demand for larger, but at the same time pocket-sized screens.
In the last year, smartphone makers have had to contend with a slowdown in sales, due to the saturation of the industry in the West and an increase in the life cycle of the devices. While until some time ago a mobile phone lasted an average of a couple of years, now it is replaced much later, thanks to the lack of particular innovations and the possibility of using most of the applications even with models that are now somewhat dated.
In anticipation of the arrival of 5G, which should prompt many people to change their phones, smartphone makers have begun to explore creative approaches, such as folding screens, to try and reinvigorate sales. Current prices are not a great incentive (as are the problems Samsung and Huawei have had), but it is a rather widespread opinion that the next evolutions could favor greater demand for smartphones that close in on themselves.
When the first iPhone was presented in 2007, the then CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, explained that the future of mobile phones would pass through smartphones without buttons and without mechanisms to open and close, which with the passage of time suffer wear and tear and they end up not working anymore. If we look around today, we can say that Jobs was right, even if he did not anticipate that the demand for smartphones with ever larger screens would gradually grow. Apple itself would have struggled not a little to accept the idea of producing larger iPhones, revising its famous position according to which the ideal screen is the one that can be reached in every corner with the thumb of the hand with which you are holding the smartphone.
However, the demand for larger screens, especially in Asian countries, brings with it a certain contradiction: people want wider touchscreens, but at the same time they ask that they be placed in phones that are comfortable to carry in the pocket, not very heavy and not too bulky. Finding the right compromise between screen size and smartphone size is not easy, and this is also why the main manufacturers have started experimenting with folding screens. The new RAZR seems to be the best compromise to date to have a large screen that can be easily kept in your pocket. Motorola is focusing on this, without forgetting who would want a RAZR in their pocket again, perhaps to feel 15 years younger.
