[Exclusive] First look at Motorola Maven: Next RAZR

Although Samsung may be the main manufacturer of foldable smartphones, it certainly doesn’t have a category of its own, bringing more OEMs on board every year; OPPO, Vivo, Huawei and Honor have at least one model on the market. Then there’s Motorola, which already has two generations of the Razr clamshell line under its belt, with more in the pipeline. Next up: codenamed Maven, a top-notch device with top specs due for release in the summer and being photographed here for the first time.

Maven has been completely redesigned, and it looks a lot more like the Galaxy Z Flip3 than it does the Razr or the Razr 5G. Smaller and more squared than its predecessors (with the chin also removed and the fingerprint sensor repositioned on the power button), it’s trying to up its photography game with dual rear cameras, as Samsung has done with the Flip. These cameras include a 50MP, f/1.8 aperture for primary shooting along with a combination of a wide-angle sensor and a macro sensor with a native resolution of 13MP. The selfie camera, on the foldable FHD + internal display, is a 32MP unit of the punch-hole assembly.

Motorola initially planned to offer two versions of the phone: one with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 system on the chip and one with the as-yet-unannounced Plus variant of that chipset (SM8475). However, with delays reported in the delivery of the latest SoC, it’s not clear how Moto plans to move forward with its SKUs. Several memory configurations will be available, consisting of 8GB or 12GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of internal storage.

Shipping to China first in late July or early August in a pair of colors – quartz black and cool blue – followed later by a global rollout, the Next Razr promises to deliver the same significant generation-to-generation changes we’ve come to expect from other early entrants in the foldable category – along with With premium prices that tend to accompany them.