Remember the iconic RAZR phone from Motorola? Your coolest friends had them, you had one, and they were the center of the “cutting-edge” cell phone world for quite a while. At a time when everyone is so iPhone-obsessed, Lenovo—Motorola’s parent company—is looking to shake things up with a reintroduction of sorts.
Lenovo is planning on relaunching the RAZR phone in February by manufacturing more than 200,000 units of the new model. According to DesignBoom, the original RAZR V3 flip phone sold more than 130 million units around the world after being introduced in 2004. The Wall Street Journal shares that this new RAZR phone will be an exclusive offer to Verizon customers in the United States.
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It will look a little bit different, according to a new mock-up submitted to the Global Design Database. If the wireframe is any indicator, there will be two inner screens on the reboot, as opposed to the single-screen original. You won’t ever have to deal with sticky buttons on this model. The price tag will also be a bit different than it was in 2004: The new phone is projected to sell for $1,500.
So, why now? Why the RAZR flip phone? Paul Pierce, one of the phone's original designers, shared an answer in an interview with CNet: “I think people are kind of yearning for and remembering back to that Razr—when it flipped open, and the sound of that, the feel of that,” he said. “We're trying to understand what we can do to revive some of that but it's got to be done in a way that fundamentally delivers on incredible experience. It can't be done just for a gimmick or something of that nature. We've got to figure out how to deliver a breakthrough."
If you’re ready to ditch your iPhone and take a cue from the trends of 15-years past, keep an eye out for more announcements from Lenovo on release dates.
