While Samsung may be the primary manufacturer of foldable smartphones, it certainly does not have the category to itself, with every passing year bringing more OEMs onboard; OPPO, Vivo, Huawei, and Honor all have at least one model on the market. And then there’s Motorola, which already has two generations of the clamshell Razr line under its belt, with more in the pipeline. Up next: codename Maven, a flagship-class device with top-of-the-line specs scheduled for a summer release and pictured here for the first time.
Completely redesigned, Maven bears more of a resemblance to the Galaxy Z Flip3 than it does the Razr or Razr 5G. Slightly boxier and more squared off than its predecessors (while also eliminating the chin and repositioning the fingerprint sensor to the power button) it attempts to up its imaging game with dual rear cameras, as Samsung has done with Flip. Those cameras include 50-megapixel, f/1.8 primary shooter alongside a combination wide-angle and macro sensor with native resolution of 13MP. Its selfie cam, on the inner, folding FHD+ display, is a 32MP module of the punch hole variety.
Motorola was initially planning to offer two versions of the handset: one with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 system-on-chip and another with the not-yet-announced Plus variant of that chipset (SM8475). However, with reported delays in the delivery of the latter SoC, it’s not clear how Moto plans to proceed with the SKUs which feature it. Several memory configurations will be available, composed of 8GB or 12GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB internal storage.
Shipping to China first in late July or early August in a pair of colorways — Quartz Black and Tranquil Blue — followed later by a global rollout, the next Razr promises to deliver the same significant generation-to-generation changes we’ve come to expect from other early entrants to the foldable category — along with the premium pricing that tends to accompany them.
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