Why Motorola Discontinued (Then Revived) The Razr Phone

The return of the Razr was a slow journey. Jim Wicks, Motorola’s head of design, didn’t rule out a comeback for the Razr in a 2013 interview with The Verge – years after the Razr V3 had been discontinued and the company was knee-deep into the Android world. Motorola was the first to launch a clamshell-style foldable phone, but it was a work nearly half a decade in the making, and beat Samsung to the market by a hair.

“We didn’t set out to recreate the Razr. Turns out, the world was ready for another Razr,” Jeff Snow, a Product General Manager at Motorola, said in an official sizzle reel. According to Glenn Schultz, Vice President of Innovation & Product Development at Motorola, it took the company four years to create the foldable Razr.

“So we’re trying to understand what we can do to revive some of that but it’s got to be done in a way that fundamentally delivers on incredible experience,” Paul Pierce, who was a member of the original Razr’s design team, told CNET back in 2018 about plans of reviving the Razr, a year ahead of the foldable Razr’s long-awaited introduction, which was the culmination of a process that entailed over 100 patent filings. “It can’t be done just for a gimmick or something of that nature. We’ve got to figure out how to deliver a breakthrough,” he added.

“It’s new technology. There are good days and bad days, but we want to feel that it’s really mature before going to market,” Motorola President Sergio Buniac said in another CNET interview. A total of 26 prototypes were created before the team finally landed on the desired clamshell design, notes Laura Joss, Global Director of Design Research at the company.