Although Motorola's advanced project and Technology Department was acquired by Google when it was sold to Lenovo in 2014, the company still managed to remain at the forefront of the mobile industry. Its third-generation foldable mobile phone, Razr brand clamshell phone code named maven, will be unveiled later this year. In addition to developing another foldable phone, a successor model code named Juno, the company is also in the early stages of developing a more ambitious device: a so-called scrollable phone called Felix.
As a new category, scrollable mobile phones are still in their infancy. Oppo has developed a scroll concept phone called X 2021, and LG was very close to releasing a phone only called LG scrollable phone before it completely withdrew from the smartphone business last year. But Felix is very different from these two efforts. In this case, a standard size, vertical facing smartphone expands horizontally as the flexible screen expands and becomes wider, thus adopting a shape more similar to a horizontal tablet.
In Motorola's first attempt at scrollable technology, the device unfolded vertically. At its most compact, about one-third of the display screen was wrapped by the rotating shaft at the bottom and facing towards the rear. The electric screen then expands to make the whole mobile phone higher rather than wider like oppo and LG devices.
Conceptually, it seems to follow Motorola's adoption of foldable Technology: other companies mainly use foldable display screens to expand the size of ordinary size phones, while Motorola's Razr series strictly focuses on making these phones with the same size screen more portable.
Here are some important considerations, the most prominent of which is that Felix is still in a very early stage of development. In fact, the software designed for it -- enabled by a new feature in the Android 12 system to split a single continuous display screen -- initially needed to be tested on the improved edge 30 Pro model because Motorola did not have a usable hardware prototype. Therefore, it can be said that Felix is at least one year away from retail.
Of course, because the plan will always change, it may take a completely different form or different characteristics before it is released - or it may simply be judged as unable to gain a foothold in the market.