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The Motorola Razr Could Return as a $1,500 Foldable Smartphone (techcrunch.com)
The iconic Motorola RAZR might be making a comeback as a $1,500 foldable screen smartphone, and it could launch as early as February, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. From a report: The price point puts the handset north of even Apple and Samsung's flagships, at $1,500. Of course, there isn't really a standardized price point for the emerging foldables category yet. The Royole FlexPai starts at around $1,300 -- not cheap, especially for a product from a relative unknown. And Samsung, the next on the list to embrace the foldable, has never been afraid to hit a premium price point. Ultimately, $1,500 could well be standard for these sorts of products. Whether or not consumers are willing to pay that, however, is another question entirely.
If I could get an old razr with a slightly larger screen that will do music, podcasts, and cat pictures, I would be good to go.
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What marketing person came up with that? Royole FlexPai? Terrible.
NO cellphone is worth $1500!
Does it include Star Trek Beaming or Time Travel? No? Then it isn't worth its weight in gold!
Jesus, that is getting into the price point where you could buy one hell of a desktop machine.
People and their damn phones. No way I'd spend anywhere near that on a phone. Then again, I don't understand why people are so obsessed with their phones as I don't use a smartphone.
I can't tell you how often I see a family of 4 in a restaurant, and absolutely everybody has their face buried in their phone -- there's some "quality family time" for you. Great way to show your kids how to be capable of having a conversation, spend your entire meal reading work emails.
I've also seen way too many managers who can't listen to an answer of the question they just asked in a meeting they called. I've pretty much reached the point where I say "if you pick up that phone again, I'm walking out because I'm tired of repeating myself because you have the attention span of a child". Honestly, you called the meeting for us to give you information, if you can't get through the meeting without asking everyone to repeat themselves half a dozen times, call me when you're willing to focus on one thing for more than 30 seconds. I walked out one time, and I'm told it took almost 10 minutes for the manager to notice.
Smartphones make people idiots. Smart phones that cost $1500 make them bigger idiots.
”Whether or not consumers are willing to pay that, however, is another question entirely.”
A foldable phone might be handy... but not THAT handy.
#DeleteChrome
the old Mororola Razr was too expensive as well.
If the pricing works like any of the older Motorola phones, the phone will only cost $1,500 for about three months and the price will quickly drop after that.
Within a year, the phone will be "free" if you sign up for a 2 year contract extension.
Can I get the Royale with Cheese?
Bias notice:
1st cellphone after leaving iPhone world, was a Motorola Droid Razr MAXX HD circa 2013. Bought it used at $140. Great phone! Loved that phone!
I used that up until late last year, at which point I bought a Motorola Moto g6. While the g6 is certain current for todays online landscape, I find there are things I don't like about it..
So bringing back the Razr, in flip phone form... just over a decade later? Or... back from 2011 again, from the prior /. article...
I guess one way to generate potential nostalgia and potential profits, is to dust off the old phone dies, throw in present hardware and label it a refresh.
The reality:
In a looming economy that has a good probability of crashing in the next 18 months.. Nevermind, whether we get our tax refunds by May....
Bold move Motorola, I mean Lenovo. I know I have tons of spare cash laying around for a new phone that is 2-3 X what I paid for my pieced together computer of 7 years old...
or the T-Mobile Sidekick with the modern network bands. That phone had an even better keyboard than the Blackberry
Gemini PDA by Planet Computer is trying to bring back the hardware keyboard to PDA/Smartphone. Okay, it's more Psion-style (clamshell) than slider, but it's something you can buy right now.
(with a choice of different OSes, too - if you don't like being a lollipop for Google to suck).
Livermorium is currently working to bring a slider keyboard smartphone on the market soon-ish. With some patience you could have the slider formfactor you would like. (Some leaks here and there seem to point to some of the designers that had contributed to Nokia's sliders have been helping that too)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
When you pulled one out everyone saw you had one. It was the iPhone of it's day. A bit of expensive kit to show people how much money you had to throw around. I'm not sure they can recapture that. Apple tried with the X line and failed.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
a couple decades, almost..... and it only cost $40 out-the-door to upgrade to the latest model, with no boost to payments, or service plan, and no contract or contract extension required. it also easily fits into pockets, has a month of standby and casual-use battery life, and you can be on the phone all day without worry about needing to plug in. and five years down the road when the battery life finally degrades to something unacceptable (to like 10 days of standby time), you can easily swap it in about 5-10 seconds.
embrace the future.. the app-free flip phone.. where it's best feature is its lack of them. must be why they call them 'feature phones'.
I have a Razr in a drawer at home I'll only charge $15 for if you want one.
Considering there are more than 1000 laptops in the $1250-$1500 price bracket alone on NewEgg, not to mention thousands more cheaper than $1250, I fail to see the utility of a laptop-priced clamshell device (so innovative) that doesn't have a keyboard and has a dinky screen. How many people can there possibly be with that much stupid money to spend on a non-Apple product?
what's inside that damn box.
[($)]
It will be entertaining to see how quickly this new company goes under.
They seem to be under the same delusion that TV manufacturers had with 4K, in that they think just having the technology is enough to have a successful product.
Technology for technology's sake is not good enough. There has to be a great enough value proposition to make the product worth buying. And I can't think of anything that would be valuable enough for me to justify spending $1500USD on a phone, regardless of how fancy the display is.
It's an Egg MacGuffin!
So, hey! Motorola! How about a big ol' boring slate phone with a replaceable battery? Headphone jack? I've got $1500 with your name written all over it.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Apparently no one has told them how well Apple is selling iPhones at the ~$1k level.
If you have any Motorola stock, I would probably get rid of it now.
Set it on Vibrate... start saving.
[($)]
I have a Razr in continuous use since new 2012. The original battery still needs charging once every 3 days. Audio is better than smart phone particularly in high noise locations. It just works like a phone needs to,
Will the new RAZR be as stout?
On bigger computers, we learned that you need to avoid proprietary dependencies so you don't get utterly fucked. Then everyone got a proprietary handheld PC, where they are perpetually fucked.
On bigger computers, we noticed the prices just kept falling. Then everyone started buying handheld PCs, where the prices go .. up?!
It's like phones are desktops for retards.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
...It's amazing how little I have ever cared or wanted to be able to fold my phone.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
They will sell like wildfire for anyone that wants a backup phone that fits in their pocket. Motorola released that video a while back where people thought they were going to issue an updated version of the original Razr, and it got a lot of us excited. They missed a great opportunity to capture some market share.
Motorola sold their cell phone biz to Google years ago after they failed to see the smartphone era approching and were sitting lazily on their Razor laurels as Jobs rolled out the iPhone. Google grabbed the tech they wanted and sold the scraps, which ended up still with the Motorola name, but owned by the Chinese.
China is a communist dictatorship; there are no private or commercial companies in such a society - all businesses are directly (communism101) or indirectly (see:Fascism - the actual form) run by the ruling party.
iPhones are made in China and thus are also communist Chinese army phones as are Huawei phones.
Sadly, Americans invented both the cellphone and the smartphone variant, yet no American company actually makes the things anymore. Just like penecillin - invented by Americans but sold out to communist China by sort-sighted treasonous scumbag CEOs looking for short-term profits and personal golden parachutes.
$1,500... DOA.