Late last year, Lenovo’s Chen Jin revealed that the company’s Motorola Razr foldable would be coming back for a third iteration. Given the previous two generations passed without much comment – other than an incredulous “how much!?” thanks to the ‘brave’ pricetag-to-perfomance ratio – this was a bit of a surprise, as Samsung has now got the Android foldable market sown up with the Z Fold 3 and Z Flip 3.
Well, Chen Jin has returned to Weibo to offer another tidbit, promising a big upgrade on the previous generation – though not perhaps in the way you’d expect. While musing about the success of the recent Moto Edge S30’s capacious 512GB version, he made a pledge: “the next product, including the new folding screen mobile phone, will have a 512GB version that surprises everyone.”
That’s double the capacity of the second-generation Motorola Razr, which was in turn double the 128GB offered on the original model. He gos on to explain that “everybody needs” plenty of storage, which is probably debatable in this golden age of streaming , but I guess the proof will be firmly in the pudding when the next Razr goes on sale.
Hopefully this won’t be the only upgrade the phone receives. As hinted at above, the first generation Razr was distinctly overpriced, coming in at over NZ$2,000 for a phone with internals (Snapdragon 710, 6GB RAM) that could be had for around NZ$430 at the time. You really were paying for the novelty of a phone that looked a bit like a Star Trek communicator.
And while the second attempt was better, the market is more competitive now than ever. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 3 comes with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor and costs a competitive NZ$1,599, and there’s talk of Google getting into the foldables game with the rumoured Pixel Notepad too.
Hopefully the large capacity won’t be the only thing that “surprises everyone”, and the company isn’t seriously considering a foldable patent that can only be described as a screen protector manufacturer’s dream…
