The early noughties nostalgia keeps on coming
David Beckham with the limited edition gold Motorola RAZR
First it was the Nokia 3310, then it was the banana phone and, now, your other favourite early noughties mobile is getting the revival treatment: the Motorola RAZR.
Once considered the coolest phone to have thanks to its razor-thin design and that satisfying flip sound, Motorola is reportedly resurrecting the phone into a new foldable screen smartphone.
Rumours have been floating around for a while that the RAZR was returning, but this week’s update comes via The Wall Street Journal. The report says the RAZR is coming back as high-end handset, with a folding screen similar to the one Samsung debuted last year at its Developer’s Conference.
The Samsung Galaxy X, as its known, folds horizontally inwards, whereas the Motorola RAZR phone was more of a landscape fold, so it will be interesting to see what the new iteration looks like.
The new device is reportedly going to be unveiled at a February launch, which makes us think it could be at Mobile World Congress, the big mobile tech conference in Barcelona at the end of February, though the actual release date will probably be later this year.
And the price? A cool $1,500 or £1,170.
This isn’t too surprising. Last year analysts were predicting that the Galaxy X could cost nearly $2,000.
At CES, the world’s first foldable smartphone, the Royole FlexPai, was on show for journalists to try out and that comes with a $1,300 price tag, around £1,000.
With Lenovo, Motorola’s parent company, looking to make around 200,000 of the new RAZR phones, even that may be too high a production number for such an expensive device.
Sure it may look cool, and it will definitely be exciting to be one of the first people with a folding smartphone, but there’s still a lot of issues that need ironing out before these types of devices become more widespread. When unitechstar.com tried out the Royole FlexPai, they criticised the performance of the phone, particularly how slow it was to function, and that the camera shutter speed was particularly awful.
A good smartphone is judged on its functionality and software, as much as a cool design, so Motorola needs to make sure the RAZR is worth the hype.