The new RAZR aesthetically recalls the original fifteen-year-old model: it has the same shell mechanism, but instead of revealing a small screen and a keyboard, when opened it shows a large touchscreen that covers much of the inner surface. The screen is flexible and folds back on itself when the smartphone is closed to put it in the pocket. On the outside there is a touchscreen, smaller, which can be used to check notifications and adjust some phone settings, without having to open it every time.
The new RAZR is not the first smartphone with a folding screen to be put up for sale, but so far the promise of phones with flexible screens has not brought the producers 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 had to be the most important innovation in the sector of recent times, but it proved to be half failure.
Even before the Galaxy Fold was put up for sale, some journalists who were reviewing it found that it took very little to damage the collapsible screen. Dust grains easily ended up in the closing mechanism, ruining 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, waiting to modify the locking system, adding protections to better isolate it and prevent dust and impurities from damaging it.
Huawei, another major smartphone manufacturer, has long announced the Mate X, another smartphone with a folding screen, which was thought to be available for sale this year. It is not clear when the new phone will be in stores, at a price of over 2,300 euros.
To be honest, things did not go much better for Motorola: initially the company was relying on selling the new RAZR during the summer, but had to revise its plans due to some delays. Its folding smartphone will be sold in the United States starting in January, while the time for its sale in Europe is not yet known. We know, however, that it will cost at least 1,500 euros, a fairly high price, especially when compared with other Motorola-produced smartphones, appreciated for being cheap.
Motorola has existed for 90 years, has brought some of the most important innovations in the mobile telephony sector (including the first mobile phone in the world), yet today is not one of the first brands that come to mind when we 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 divided into two independent companies: Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions. Motorola Mobility was sold to Google in 2012, when the Silicon Valley company thought of competing directly with Apple, producing their own smartphones with the Android operating system. In a few years it became clear to Google that it was better to challenge Apple through already established manufacturers of smartphones with Android, like Samsung, and in 2014 Motorola Mobility was sold to the 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 reorganisations and a considerable 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 inexpensive smartphones on the market today, with extremely positive reviews also on Amazon, where sometimes the less expensive models do not receive praise because of the promises they cannot keep.
The new RAZR costs much more than a Moto G7, but Motorola is interested in showing what can be done in the emerging smartphone sector with folding screens. Once opened, the screen of the RAZR is 6.2 inches wide and has a different mechanism than the Galaxy Fold: according to the designers it should prove 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 break angle, even if this results in having a very large smartphone in your pocket. Huawei has chosen to keep the folding screen on the outside of its Mate X, reducing the risk of breakage, because the screen never reaches an angle too small.
After numerous attempts and some broken screens, the designers of the new RAZR 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 stresses that could damage it. Motorola says it has tested the new screen in numerous conditions, but only after its release will we know if the measures studied were sufficient to avoid the worst.
The external screen of the new RAZR required less headaches. It has a size of 2.7 inches and, as was the case with the original models, it is mostly a 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.
Hardly the new RAZR will become a global success as the original version came out 15 years ago, also because many modern-day buyers were too young when the first model came out to remember it, or they weren't really born. This is why Motorola will try to move by bringing together both the nostalgia and the new effect, focusing more on the latter to attract new customers.
The biggest obstacle could be that of the price, considering that with lower expenses you can buy Apple's iPhone, Google's Pixels, Samsung's most prestigious Galaxy and Huawei's cell phones, all considered among the best smartphones in circulation. The new RAZR could, however, encourage 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 manufacturers have had to deal with a slowdown in sales, due to the saturation of the sector in the West and an increase in the life cycle of the devices. While until recently a cell phone lasted on average 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 by now a little dated.
Waiting for the arrival of 5G, which should lead many people to change their phone, smartphone manufacturers have begun to explore creative approaches, such as folding screens, to try to reinvigorate sales. Current prices are not a great incentive (as are the problems faced by Samsung and Huawei), but it is a fairly widespread opinion that the next developments could favor greater demand for smartphones that close on themselves.
When the first iPhone was introduced in 2007, the then CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, explained that the future of mobile phones would pass by smartphone without keys and without mechanisms to open and close, which over time suffer from 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 had not anticipated that the demand for smartphones with bigger and bigger screens would gradually grow. The same Apple would have struggled not a little to accept the idea of producing larger iPhones, revising its famous position that the ideal screen is the one reachable 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 a wider touchscreen, but at the same time they ask that they be put in comfortable phones to carry in their pockets, not too heavy and not too bulky. Finding the right compromise between screen size and smartphone size is not easy, and this is one of the reasons why the major manufacturers have started experimenting with folding screens. The new RAZR seems to be the best compromise to date to have a large screen to easily keep in your pocket. Motorola is focusing on this, without forgetting those who would like to have a RAZR in their pocket again, perhaps to feel 15 years younger.
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https://www.ilpost.it/2019/11/14/motorola-razr-schermo-pieghevole/
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