At $1,500, this has now become the idiot tax item of the decade. Retro cool? Sure. Foldable? Neat. Worth that much more than a bog standard $500 phone? No way.
No Motorola Razr comeback orders in 2019: Costly foldy nostalgia mobe pulled back
We've got some bad news for the deeper-pocketed nostalgia-tinged tech fans out there: Motorola is pushing back the launch of its foldable reboot of the Motorola Razr. Preorders of the revived flip-phone were expected to open on December 26, with the first units trickling out on January 9, but those dates have been ditched in …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 26th December 2019 20:56 GMT Ogi
I don't know. A few years ago if you told me a "bog standard phone" was $500, I would have thought you mental. That was a price for the top end stuff, and usually not worth the money unless you really just wanted to show off.
Funny how things change. For my part, I still consider spending more than $250 a phone mad, but I admit it is hard to find anything decent below that price point anymore.
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Monday 23rd December 2019 19:14 GMT Teiwaz
Foldable
Get the feeling phone companies think foldable screens are going to be the next big must have...So they're being cautious in case they poison the well prematurely, but still rushing to be first to get a stake in the new gold rush.
Novelty thinking.
I think customers are mostly well past novelty thinking, a smart phone has become a necessity more than a novelty for most, with suitably modest budget concerns for many.
Douglas Adams 3 Rules of Technology : the current generation of just or near adults have grown up with mobile phones as 'just the way the world works'
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 10:21 GMT Kevin McMurtrie
Re: The Original Razr Rocked...
I remember it being a really cool phone until it synced up with AT&T and lost all of it's features. Those were the dark days when you had to pay telcos extra monthly fees to use apps that came with the phone. It couldn't even play audio with the SIM card in it (extra $4/month).
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Monday 23rd December 2019 21:30 GMT rcxb
Re: 128GB of ROM?
By "ROM" they mean disk-type SSD storage (in contrast to RAM). A common misnomer with smart phones.
You can certainly go through 128GB of storage on your phone. Throw your entire music collection on there, plus several graphics heavy apps/games and 128GB doesn't look very big.
And if you store any video locally on your phone, you'll run out mighty quick.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 22:02 GMT DiViDeD
Re: 128GB of ROM?
You can never have too much music!
That said, old TV series (think really old - Adam Adamant, The Prisoner, Quatermass, Doomwatch kind of old) and movies have always been my downfall. After unannounced and arbitrary removal of items from streaming services,I prefer to have my own copy of everything. Even my 4TB drives are pretty full.
Now all I have to do is put aside the 250 or so years I need to watch them all.
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Tuesday 24th December 2019 10:42 GMT Captain Scarlet
Re: 128GB of ROM?
Nope, Motorola keep giving me notifications I can't disabled on the G7 Power (Without replacing the OS) of new phones such as the Motorola One.
Tbh things like that hack me off, I already have a phone from you and basically spamming me in this way, not updating the bloody phone enough (Only received 2 security updates, also told by support updating was down to Android when its not) mean I no longer recommend Motorola and will be looking elsewhere when I do come to replace it.
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Tuesday 24th December 2019 20:45 GMT Danny 2
Peddle has hit the metal
Chuck Peddle, the designer of the 6502 processor, has died. Just to prove Motorola over-pricing isn't new, this from Wikipedia:
In 1973, Peddle worked at Motorola on the development of the 6800 processor.
Peddle recognized a market for an ultra-low-price microprocessor and began to champion such a design to complement the $300 Motorola 6800. His efforts were frustrated by Motorola management and he was told to drop the project. He then left for MOS Technology, where he headed the design of the 650x family of processors; these were made as a $25 answer to the Motorola 6800. The most famous member of the 650x series was the 6502, developed in 1975, which was priced at 15% of the cost of an Intel 8080, and was subsequently used in many commercial products, including the Apple II, Commodore VIC-20, Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari 8-bit computers and arcade video games, Oric computers, and the BBC Micro from Acorn Computers.
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Monday 30th December 2019 13:30 GMT DJV
Re: Peddle has hit the metal
Sad to hear he has passed on. His spats with Jack Tramiel were quite legendary back in the day.
I loved the story about him having his wife sell the 6501 chips from a jar - apparently, the ones at the bottom were all duff!
https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/the-legendary-chuck-peddle-inventor-of-the-personal-computer/
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Friday 27th December 2019 13:37 GMT Don Jefe
Production Profits Pointlessly Small
“Demand is high” is a meaningless marketing statement. The fact is every major element of the modern phone production line is geared to unibody devices.
From a manufacturing standpoint a flip phone is effectively two devices. They have to dedicate a line to produce half of a single device when the same line could be turning out complete devices instead.
That’s an expensive prospect and that can be seen in the high price.
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Friday 27th December 2019 18:32 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Production Profits Pointlessly Small
That logic applies all foldable. They may not be here yet, in a reliable form. They may take a while to gain a foothold and evolve some decent reliability, but they will get there and they will become standard, unless some other form of "disappearing" screen tech comes along, such as mid-air holograms.
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 10:14 GMT Kevin McMurtrie
Fashion piece
This phone looks great and it's unique. It will do well with people who want to look nice but don't really need much of a phone. The same people might spend over $10000 on a mechanic watch that performs worse than a $25 digital watch.
It's not for me. I'm a nerd. I need hundreds of GB storage, my odd collection of software tools, and a headphone jack that might be used as a signal generator or playing loud music.