Let’s hope new Moto Razr holds up better than the original

While the the original Motorola Razr V3 was having its worldwide moment back in the mid-aughts, I was hunkered down over a table full of scalpel-sized tools, peering through soldering fumes in a cell phone repair shop in western Kentucky. My task? To dissect and resuscitate some hundred or so of its brethren. Having gotten to know its guts so well back then, news of a foldable 2020 reboot gave me reason to break out the T6 screwdriver and review some of the then-cutting edge tech’s significant design flaws. As exciting as the new tech was at the time, those flaws gave us a glimpse of the coming years, where some high-priced phones would struggle to stand up to daily use.

Let there be no doubt: When the Motorola Razr premiered in 2004, nearly everyone wanted one of these things. Selling 50 million units from 2004 to 2006, the Razr became the skinny celebrity of the emerging cellphone market, seen in the hands of countless movie stars during a massive publicity push (the Academy Awards even included them in stars’ gift bags in 2005). It was the Nokia-killer, the phone to usher in a new era, letting you text faster on a sleek metal keyboard while shooting photos and accessing the internet. Best of all, it delivered a sharply satisfying clack when you snapped its screen shut. 

Read more: Moto Razr 2020: 4 things you need to know before you buy