Motorola to bring out new Razr flip phone

It’s a shame flip-phones went out of fashion. I can see why they did: most people only use the phone part of a mobile phone as a sort of secondary function these days. They are now fully fledged computers, messagers and cameras, and more screen real estate was desirable to support these new aspects.

To thrive in today’s market they’ll need to have a folding screen and that’s what Motorola have done with their new Razr. There’ll be a 6.2in folding screen on the inside and a smaller screen on the outer shell for things like messages. It'll be 14 mm thick, which is only 0.1 mm thicker than the original Razr. I hope they have more luck with their folding screen than some other manufacturers have.

Motorola were a ground-breaking company once and their 2004 Razr flip-phone was quite popular, but these days they don’t have a particularly big slice of the mobile phone market.

One of the advantages of flip-phones was that they were easier to secrete in a pocket and that will still apply to Motorola’s new Razr, although of course they won’t be as small as the phones were back in 2004.

The new Razr will be released in the US in December and elsewhere in the world following that. It will allegedly cost $1,500 (£1,150 approx.), which sounds quite expensive to me.

I have respect for Motorola because the first mobile phone I ever had was made by them and it had the best reception of all the mobile phones I’ve ever owned. I don’t know how they did it. Every other phone has only managed to get a couple of bars of reception at best here and more often that not it's no bars at all, but that Motorola always gave me a good connection.

I always liked flip-phones, not least because you could pretend they’re Start Trek communicators. Although it’s fair to say I won’t be changing over to one. I’m too much of an Apple nerd these days.