In what we’re sure is an entirely coincidental move, Motorola has unveiled its new foldable, less than 24 hours after Samsung showed its hand.
To be fair, this has been signposted for some time with Motorola’s parent company Lenovo announcing the third generation of Razr on Weibo on Christmas Day. That would have been a nice Christmas present if the actual delivery wasn’t eight months later — more of an IOU than a gift.
Anyway, it’s here now — at least in China. Once again it uses a clamshell design, meaning a phone of regular dimensions folds in half like the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip series.
This time, though, Motorola has learned that if you’re going to charge top dollar, you need to avoid scrimping on internals, meaning that it not only matches Samsung with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset, but betters the Korean firm in whole host of ways. It’s got a 144Hz refresh rate on the 6.7in screen, a larger 4,600mAh battery and a better specced 50MP main camera.
All very impressive sounding on paper, but we’ll have to see how it compares on build quality (something of an Achilles heel on earlier generations) and, more importantly, price.
The latter has been revealed, but only for the Chinese market where it’ll debut, so it’s not clear if the tempting 5,999 to 7,299 RMB (~NZ$1,385 to NZ$1,685) price point will be replicated elsewhere in the world. Or indeed, if it’ll ship to much of the rest of the world at all.
Hopefully it will as, currently, Samsung has an almost free run at the foldable market, which may explain the steady-as-she-goes updates to the Fold and Flip range announced yesterday. The 2022 Razr looks extremely promising, and could be just the thing to help Samsung avoid complacency and to keep innovating in the foldable space.
