Pictures and video galore
If you’ve had enough of foldables, you’ll be glad to know rollable phones are set to become the hot new thing once they hit the market. But as with most cookery on the R&D stoves, it’s the waiting that’s always the hardest part: LG (RIP), Oppo, and Samsung have teased us with demos, plans, and expectations, but all of them have yet to get something in our hands. Well, at MWC 2023, Motorola is doing just that. Okay, maybe not your hands per se, but certainly the hands of some people outside of Lenovo.
Avi Greengart, a founding analyst with Techsponential, is one of those people who have gotten to try out this device in Barcelona. He’s shared his experiences and observations on Twitter.
This device appears to be the same one Motorola showcased at Lenovo Tech World 22, but we’re getting way more visual detail on how the phone actually works with these off-angle photos and videos.
From what we can tell, it appears the display doesn’t actually roll in and out of its housing — instead, the display panel is anchored to the back by a servo motor component that adjusts its position based on how much screen it needs to show out front. Any display acreage on the rear side goes dark after a move. The mechanism is able to adjust to different contexts automatically, but users can also double-press the power button for a manual change.
From these later clips, we can get a good sense of the size of the actual device with Greengart noting that it isn’t as small as Motorola’s recent foldable Razr devices. The display has to roll back to such an extent where we’re able to find the selfie camera and a phone speaker hidden behind it on the phone’s body.
We may have more to report on in terms of our own hands-on experiences, but we may be rising to new heights of excitement — Greengart seems to imply that the device is market-ready, but not headed there in the near term.
