For those of us who live in Malaysia, and who are looking to add some cell phone slimness to our country’s wireless home network, there’s some good news on the horizon: the Razr is coming.
BrightStar, the mobile phone distributor, has announced that Motorola Mobility’s Droid Razr will be released in Malaysia sometime next month. While no specific date has yet been confirmed, the phone will hit stores in Singapore on November 11th, meaning the Malaysian buyers will probably see it retailed shortly thereafter.
The Razr, which hearkens back to Motorola’s glory days as a revolutionary in the flip phone market, is the company’s most anticipated phone release in quite some time. On the most basic level it emulates the razor-like slimness of its 2004 precursor. Like the original Motorola Razr, the Droid Razr is advertised as incredibly narrow: the phone is 7.1 millimeters wide. According to Motorola, this makes the Razr the thinnest smartphone in the world.
But while size and shape may have been the chief selling point of the original Razr, Motorola’s new model has much more going for it. The Droid Razr is equipped with Verizon’s 4G network and has processing abilities more befitting of your standard computer. It further features a 4.3 inch Super AMOLED qHD display with 16 GB of internal memory, a 1.2 GHz dual core processor, and advanced features such as its webtop application. The phone runs on Android 2.3.
The release of the Droid Razr signifies an important turning point for Motorola Mobility, which only recently separated from its parent company and is now in the process of being acquired by Google. With the Droid Razr immediately finding itself in competition with such high-end phones like the Samsung Galaxy S II and the iPhone 4S, its launch could give Google a successful hardware product through which it can further increase the Android’s market share. But if the Razr fails to live up to expectations, or simply underperforms in sales, then everyone – Google, Motorola Mobility, and the Motorola brand – will suffer as a result.
It should be interesting to see what happens when the Razr hits Malaysian stores. Based on the recent announcement, we shouldn’t have more than a few weeks to wait.
