Motorola has released smartphones in the
past but none of them were special. They
were like the others. But now it seems as if
the phoenix has risen from the ashes.

Speaking of that, there’s the fact that flexible displays are possible. And the RAZR was an iconic smartphone design in the past where candybar type smartphones were usual. the RAZR was the thinnest of them all however it took three generations to make it a serious competitor. The first two releases suffered from bad runtimes and a ridiculously small amout of memory to hold contacts and photos frustrating users to the maximum.

Now, over ten years later and with the technology having advanced, it seems as if there’s a good chance for Motorola to enter the floor again with a cool, modern phone that’s emerging from the usual smartphones today.

But if you want to have one of those, then you have to dig deep in your pockets.

Not less than 1600 US$ will be asked upon initial release. For that you will get a 16MP camera, a 21:9 display featuring a 6.2″ diameter with a resolution of 2142×876 pixels. Unfortunately that’s not even FHD! it would have been more wise to employ a 2520×1080 pixel display in order to maintain aspect ratio AND allow FullHD.

The processor itself is also considered rather midrange and not top-end like the price would let assume. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 comes with 8 cores of which 2 cores (A75 type) are clocked at 2.2GHz while the 6 small cores (A55 type) will clock at maximum 1.7GHz. Interesting fact is that the processor has been released on November 23th, 2018 which makes it about 1 year old by now which is considered much in the technology era.

However comparing it to Apple’s A13 chip for example, the processor rates at 89% capacity (in the tests that run on both platforms.

If we compare it to the most recent Snapdragon processor, well… this value falls back at 84%.

So while the price is high-end, the components aren’t. But the concept in itself might find it’s charme. Users of the legendary StarTAC phone

The built-in modem chip allows for up to 800Mbit/s downstream and 150Mbit/s upstream as speeds in the LTE network using a 4×4 MIMO setup.

Mtorola itself says that the display won’t suffer from bending stress as they use a similar technology as the ThinkPad X1 Fold. They teamed up with Lenovo to make that technology being present in the new RAZR Fold.

Apart from that the phone won’t be resistant to water and dust and needs taken care of carefully otherwise ceasing to function rather quickly. The display is also not scratch-resistant which is due to the flexibility of the display. Other smartphones with a foldable display aren’t scratch-resistant either.

The display on the outside doesn’t allow apps to be run on it and only serves the function as information hub and, if the front camera (5MP) is used for selfies, as a live monitor.

Here’s a closeup on the revolutionary folding mechanism protecting the display from sharp bends while still maintaining a flat surface when opened: