#HTE

Is Apple Sleeping? Motorola Returns to Human-Focused Design Dominance with Their Incredible Folding Smartphone

If there’s a flip phone design that you miss, it’s likely Motorola’s old Razr, or maybe even the Star-Tac. The flip phone era was fun to experience, from a design perspective, because there was plenty of room for designers to experiment; then everything went Glass Rectangle in 2007, and nowadays manufacturers compete on bezel size and technological features we neither want nor need.

Well, Motorola is showing that they’re back in the design game with the resurrection of their Razr brand–which handily combines the smartphone and flip phone form factors:

So how did the designers pull that fancy hinge off? The answer is four years and 26 prototypes. Check out how it works:

I think the outer screen that shows notifications, in the phone’s compact form, is brilliant. It’s the kind of human-focused touch that Apple no longer possesses, and Motorola’s design team (and whatever executive backed them) deserves props. Let the other manufacturers chase technological demons inside the glass rectangle. I don’t care about face recognition, don’t need a better camera, don’t care about meaningless size differences on the millimeter scale. What I want is a phone that actually fits in a pocket and where the screen only gets big when I need it to. And Motorola appears to have delivered.

Next we’ll have to wait and see if the thing is actually durable. Fingers crossed.