Having a cavity is usually a bad thing, especially when it's your smartphone that
has the cavity. During our normal durability test, my thumb cracked through the square display of the
Motorola Razr Plus like a fat polar bear on thin ice. Today during the teardown we'll see
just how big that internal cavity really is, and why it's even there in the first place. However,
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Now it's time to see why the Motorola Razr Plus doesn't
have any support underneath the glass. Let's get started.
[Intro]
As always, we must begin this folding phone autopsy with a pristine workspace.
Cleanliness is paramount around these parts. And of course, heat is our best friend when removing
the back glass panel. Or I guess the front panels depending on if the phone is open or not. With the
adhesive cleanly sliced away around three of the 4 edges, I can lift the panel up revealing the 5
watt wireless charging pad and a very interesting snake-like gold ribbon cable. In my case the front
screen is a little bit easier to remove since we don't really care about it surviving or not. It's
interesting the Motorola has placed a flexible AMOLED screen on this side as well. Just glued to
the back side of the glass so it's not doing any flexing even though it is technically flexible.
With some persuasion, the square exterior can lift up and away from the body giving us our
first look inside at the small recessed battery and the void. We'll get a closer look in a second.
There are two screws holding down the metal plate which covers some Lego-style ribbon
connectors. These have some simple red rubber gaskets surrounding the plug to help maintain
the Razr Plus' IP52 water resistance. I don't see any dust inside of the phone so the seals
are doing a good job. The upper screen ribbon is held in place with a singular
screw and one metal bracket, then the screen ribbon can be unplugged just like a little
Lego. Once again, not a very flexible screen while glued to the glass slab,
but maybe Motorlla got a discount for buying multiple flexible displays at the same time.
Three more Phillips head screws hold down another metal bracket over the motherboard
ribbons. And again we find some more neat little rubber gaskets. Rubber is pretty
good at providing water resistant protection. We can unsnap the two long extension ribbons
and the fingerprint scanner just like little Legoes. And we find an additional 7 screws
holding down the top camera plastics. Once those are gone, along with our SIM card tray friend,
the motherboard can come away from the phone in one piece. And it actually looks pretty
cool. The circuits have a psychedelic sheen on the top that reminds me of a grocery store
parking lot after the rain. Or the time BP leaked 3 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Our secondary 13 megapixel wide angle camera does not have OIS,
but the main 12 megapixel camera does have optical image stabilization. The
tiny little front-facing camera, though, is 32 megapixels and does not have OIS.
With the motherboard gone,
all we have left in the upper half of the phone is the 7000 series aluminum
and our really thin battery, which has no magical pull tabs. I also seem to have misplaced my glass
alcohol dropper, so we're just going to douse this bad boy in alcohol and continue on our way.
The top battery is 835 milliamp hours. The bottom half of the Motorola Razr Plus has a whole lot
going on. With the 5 watt wireless charger lifted up I can remove 6 additional Phillips head screws
that are holding down the bottom board. And we finally get to see what this orange perforated
looking cable is for. Normally in smartphones we have wider blue signal wires with little
circular heads. And Motorola this time has turned those multiple wires into a singular
ribbon with the same styles of connection. Kind of nifty. It also turns out that the
larger of the two batteries here in the Razr Plus also does not have any magical pull tabs,
which is very unfortunate. But with some painful prying and a decenout dowsing of alcohol, we can
lift the 2,965 milliamp hour capacity rectangle from the frame, bringing our total to 3,800.
The bottom board containing the 30 watt USB-C charger comes out next,
and this also has oil spill vibes to it. We also get our extremely tiny square
haptic motor for notifications and vibrations. And of course,
our lower loudspeaker which does have foam balls inside. Thumbs up for that.
With everything gone from inside the phone, we can more accurately visualize the void underneath
the front glass screen. My metal pry tool is acting as the top glass layer with the metal
bracket showing a few millimeters of vacant space below the thin display. It's hard to
say for sure if the glass really could just be popped with one finger since technically
during my test there were external bending forces involved. I'm half tempted to buy another Razr
Phone just to give it a shot and see if I can pinch an entire phone to death...for science,
obviously. An Achilles heel on a thousand dollar piece of tech is
something worth knowing. Let me know down in the comments if you think I should.
While we're this deep we might as well check out the hinge mechanism. The metal bracket where the
damage occurred is holding onto a large white rigid piece of plastic. I assume this is part
of the water and dust resistance. I'll pull 8 more screws out from the outer edge of the hinge before
flipping the Razr Plus over to get access to the screws underneath the flexible AMOLED.
Now obviously Samsung is the main player in the folding phone space. They've been
pumping out multiple folding phones every year since 2019. And I've not
been able to specifically find out who's supplying flexible displays to Lenovo,
who owns Motorola, who built this Razr. But I do know that Samsung owns the ultra thin glass,
or UTG trademark. And this flexible display that Motorola is using does have ultra thin
glass inside. You can see the cracks appear as I smash the glass with my finger. I don't
think we need Sherlock Holmes to figure out where the folding screens are coming from.
With all the other beautiful layers separated from the body, we get access to the graphite
cooling pad and the final few screws of the hinge. I'm starting to think that this phone
isn't going back together. Now with the previous Razr Folding Phone, it had one
of the more simple hinges that we've ever seen – just two pins acting like a door hinge more than
anything else. But it looks like this time around Motorola has taken a page out of Samsung's book
with a far more complex geared and grooved hinge system. Now my personal opinion is
that I think Samsung might just be helping other manufacturers like Google and Motorola,
helping them design their folding phones in order to sell more flexible displays into
mainstream folding tech faster. It's either that or Motorola is about to get wrecked by the most
powerful lawyers outside of Disney because this hinge on the Motorola Razr Plus and Samsung Flip
4 are suspiciously similar. I think it's great of course. You know, sharing technology is how
the world progresses faster and I'm all down for it, assuming that's actually what's going on.
Bring on more folding phones because I'll be right here waiting.
Hit that subscribe if you haven't already. And thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.