The screen on Inputmag’s Motorola Razr has reportedly developed an air bubble and is beginning to peel back.
Raymond Wong/Inputmag
The Motorola Razr has been on the market for less than two weeks and already one of the foldable phones is reportedly showing excessive wear and tear.
Made of a combination of glass, plastic and stainless steel, the Razr comes at an important moment for foldable phones. It’s the first proof of concept for a folding phone whose screen bends in half vertically to maximize screen real estate while saving physical space.
Part of the charm of those flip phones of yore was that they were practically indestructible — those gadgets could be dropped, beaten and tossed and still manage to survive. But for one early reviewer, the phone has been a “nightmare.”
A staffer at Inputmag reports that their Razr is peeling apart at the device’s fold, with a giant horizontal air bubble separating the top lamination and the display panel. The damage isn’t the result of rigorous durability tests but rather occurred in the user’s front jeans pocket sometime during a 45-minute subway ride in New York, Raymond Wong writes.
When Wong took the phone out to take some pictures, that is when he says he noticed the air gap.
“The screen was completely warped from hinge-to-hinge with the top layer raised like a poorly applied screen protector,” Wong writes.
CNET has put the Razr, as well as foldable rival Samsung Galaxy Z Fold, through a series of real-world drop tests. The Razr sustained a hairline fracture across the glass from a three-foot drop while closed, and a flip-open drop from five feet resulted in a few more cracks on the front, but the touchscreen still worked well, and the screen inside was still in working order. We did notice that the metal grille that covers the bottom of the phone had started to come loose.
A Motorola representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.