There are still a lot of questions about whether or not Motorola’s upcoming Razr V4 can compete in important areas like camera ability, but on form-factor alone the rumoured foldable phone will be popular.
The flip-up shape is familiar, reduces the phone’s overall size and makes the most ergonomic sense for a foldable device. If you’re trying to convince a not-so-tech savvy public to adopt new tech, housing it in a familiar shape does a lot of the work for you. The V4 could do that much better than the Galaxy Fold.
But with reports that Samsung is working on multiple new Galaxy Folds, what does the next iteration have to do to fight off competition from Motorola?
No longer a proof of concept
A Wall Street Journal story earlier this year reported that the V4 could be priced around $1500. There’s no getting away from the fact that it’s expensive, especially when up against current generation smartphones, which – for the best on the market – cost roughly two thirds of that. Up against other foldable phones though, it’d be cheaper than the Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X – both of which cost in or around $2000.
New technology is always pricey. But I hope that as the next Fold comes out, alongside Microsoft’s Surface Duo and other Android foldable phones, we’re looking at the beginnings of a price war. If so, Samsung should be leading the way.
The Korean company is competitive with its pricing for its flagship tech and it’s a big player during the Black Friday sales period. It has experimented with eye-catching promotions in the past to lure customers away from Apple, too.
A second foldable phone means moving the nascent Galaxy Fold line away from being proof of concept to being a cemented part of Samsung’s product range. That means Samsung will have to start pricing it competitively and perhaps rehashing old promotions like Test Drive to (again) lure potential customers away from genuinely threatening rival devices.
A new form factor
There are probably a lot of reasons why Samsung chose to go with a clam-shell shape for the Fold, including manufacturing cost, complexity, marketing and ergonomics. But, using whatever data it has collected from the first device, I hope Samsung starts to be more creative with future Fold designs.
There are a lot of shapes for Samsung to play with, most of which have come directly from the Korean company over the last seven years via leaks and patent applications. Of all of the proposed designs such as flip-up and reverse clam shell, the rollable concept is the most intriguing to me.
First seen in Samsung’s 2013 CES advert, when the technology was then known as ‘Youm’, the cylindrical-shaped phone houses a flexible display that rolls out like a medieval scroll. It was, of course, fantasy in 2013 and it might still be in 2019. But it’s also the most exciting form a foldable phone could take for one simple reason: it saves space.
This is a large part of why I think the V4 will be popular: it folds down into a smaller, more pocketable phone. It pretty much condenses into a device half of its unfurled size.
A rollable Samsung phone goes several steps further by reducing the handset to the size of a packet of Mentos. Again, the technical complexity of cramming a large enough battery – and other rigid components – into a long, thin cylinder may be beyond 2019’s minds. But a larger, clunkier device that could fit everything in and still embodied the rollable concept could very well be popular.
An honorable mention to what’s under the hood…
As I said earlier the Motorola V4 remains largely an unknown. Some of the specs have leaked, and they suggest a mid-range phone, but how good the camera is, how sturdy the flexible display is, how long the battery lasts and how smooth the overall performance is still unknown. After 10 years of broadly good devices we know to expect a reasonably high standard of smartphone from Samsung that ticks all of the above boxes, that’s less the case with Motorola.
An usual new phone can only beguile people for so long. If the V4 doesn’t deliver on every other metric that we use to measure how good a smartphone is, it will fail and make the Galaxy Fold 2’s life much, much easier.