The Motorola Razr is back!
The sleek phone debuted in 2004. In the mid-2000s, before the rise of the iPhone and smartphones, the Razr was the bestselling phone of all time. It was amazingly thin—and remains thin even by today’s standards—with a sweet, blue-backlit metal keypad.
The Razr of old was a product of the 2000s, before phones became powerful, internet-centric devices with multiple cameras and apps.
For the last few years, Motorola has carved a niche in the smartphone market with mid-range, featured-packed smartphones, but the company hopes to make a splash with the new Razr. The company, as CNN noted, brought the brand back in 2011 with the Droid Razr. However, that didn’t get much traction.
The new Razr, on the other hand, is going for the “it” factor (and at $1,500, it’s priced like it). It’s sleek and foldable just like its predecessor, but the phone folds out into a fully-featured smartphone. While it’s not a dual-screen product like the Galaxy Fold, it features a foldable screen.
That means it’ll fit nicely in your pocket, one of the best features of the original Razr’s sleek profile.
When unfolded, the phone boasts a 6.2-inch screen, which is fairly standard in the smartphone market these days. It also has a second exterior screen that, when folded, allows users to see notifications and respond to texts.
For now, it’ll be a Verizon exclusive.
CNN Business’ David Goldman is excited about the hinge:
Motorola achieved this ultimate pocketability with an ingeniously well-engineered hinge. Unlike the Samsung Galaxy Fold, the Razr is perfectly flat when folded: it has no gap. The Razr has two pieces of metal that snap up against the screen to hold it firmly in place when it’s opened. Everyone who played around with the phone during its unveiling event Wednesday night said opening and closing the phone was among the most satisfying features of the Razr. Hanging up a phone call with flip is a bygone of the last decade that I miss.
Again, the Razr retails at $1,500—putting it in the league of the most premium of premium smartphones, even if the specs aren’t. It’ll run Android 9. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 processor isn’t exactly flagship and is firmly in the mid-range category. The phone has a 16-megapixel camera. The battery, at 2510 mAh, isn’t very beefy (although Verizon says the phone has “all-day battery life”).
The phone does feature 6GB of memory, 128GB of storage and a USB-C connector.
Preorders begin on Dec. 26, 2019, according to Verizon. The new Razr launches on Jan. 9, 2020.