Before there were smartphones, there were feature phones, and one of the most iconic was the Motorola RAZR. If you’re my age (or a bit younger, I’ll grant) then the Motorola RAZR was the epitome of cool – a flip phone with cameras that looked, sounded and just was cool.
While Motorola tried to bring the RAZR brand back a few years ago (quite early in the Android timeline), those phones weren’t super successful. Jason reviewed the RAZR M back in 2012, and I quite liked it too – so much so that I went and bought one.
Fast forward to 2019, and Motorola has brought back the RAZR again, and this time it’s a foldable Android smartphone, and boy oh boy does it look good.
The 2019 RAZR offers much more than the earlier RAZR namesakes did. When closed, it resembles the look of the original flip phone, though it is a bit wider. It features a 2.7-inch external screen which is primarily intended for interacting with notifications, though you can access the Google Assistant here, and also control music and respond to messages.
To get the real action, though, you need to open the RAZR, and inside there’s a 6.2-inch Flex View OLED display at 2,142 x 876 pixels. It’s narrow, giving an aspect ratio of 21:9, but it doesn’t look unworkable – far from it.
The coolest feature, as with other foldables, is if you have something up on the Quick View screen and open the RAZR, that content will automatically be opened for you on the larger display to continue interacting with it.
Below the Quick View display is a 16MP camera with “Night Vision”, though we would love to understand what’s behind the name and whether Moto’s night vision works like the current feature leaders – Huawei’s phones and Google’s Pixel range.
Inside the Moto RAZR is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 processor, 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, charged by a USB-C port and a mid-sized 2,510 mAh battery. This battery might be a little on the small size, but with 15W TurboPower charging, it won’t be too difficult to keep it topped off with quick charges if needed.
Unfortunately, the RAZR launches with Android 9 – instead of the more foldable-friendly Android 10 – but we imagine that might be coming soon as an update.
Moto’s RAZR 2019 will be available as a Verizon exclusive in the US at this stage, and will retail for $1,500 USD (or about $2,200 AUD) when it launches in early January 2020.
The good news for us in Australia, though, is that the new Moto RAZR will be coming here too.
Danny Adamopoulos, GM Sales APAC for Mature Markets confirmed to Ausdroid earlier this week that we’d see the new foldable Moto RAZR in Australia in the not too distant future.
Stay tuned…
Love the original phone and im very keen on getting this new one, specs are not top range but it’s still good enough, it’s more a nostalgia phone than ur normal day to day usage phone, hopefully it won’t take a long time for them to bring it to Australia
I’m tempted, would be interested to see how the screens performs after 6 + months. I would also have like maybe a bit bigger battery, I wouldn’t have cared if it was a couple mm thicker.
A much better implementation than Samsung’s with a few compromises. Love how they put in a physical fingerprint sensor.
Looks like a Aussie release is on the cards at some point:
https://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/668658/yes-new-motorola-razr-coming-australia/