It’s funny to think that it was just six years ago that the Motorola RAZR was considered the pinnacle of mobile phone engineering. Now, Moto plans to bring back the iconic brand as an Android smartphone.
The move makes sense. The original RAZR’s slimline design and iconic style sold by the millions in the years before smartphone’s took off. But it was, unfortunately, a success the US company couldn’t repeat.
Despite the name, the new Droid RAZR will bear a number of substantial differences to the old phone. Gone is the flip-phone styling, replaced by a large, 4.3-inch slab of gorilla-glass Super AMOLED touchscreen with diamond-cut accents. It will house a 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 1GB RAM and run the 2.3.5 version of Android, otherwise known as Gingerbread.
What will remain is the thinness. The new RAZR is reportedly just 7.1mm thin at its thinnest point – that’s ridiculously thin given the tech inside. Also ridiculously awesome is the addition of a KEVLAR coating to the phone, which may not make it bulletproof, but make it splash resistant, even on the internal chip boards.
The phone itself is going to be available in November for $0 up front on a $59 cap plan with Optus. Given the super-competitive nature of the Android smartphone market at the moment, this is a pretty big move from Google’s handset partner.
Price: $0 up front on a $59 Optus cap plan
Web: Optus
