Motorola is said to be working on a new rollable smartphone, and it might operate a little differently to the other rollable prototypes we’ve seen to date.
According to arch tipster Evan Blass (via 91mobiles), the Lenovo-owned company is working on an ambitious new smartphone under the codename ‘Felix’. That phone will be Motorola’s first rollable smartphone.
Unlike any of the previous rollable concepts we’ve seen from the likes of Oppo, TCL, and LG, the Motorola rollable will unfurl vertically.
The likes of the Oppo X 2021 and the LG Rollable all expanded horizontally, making them effectively normal portrait phones that expanded into tablets. Conversely, the Motorola Felix is said to start from an extremely compact form, then expand vertically into a normal-size phone.
It sounds broadly akin to the difference between the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 and the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3. The former turns a normal phone into a tablet, while the latter scrunches a normal phone up into a more compact form factor when not in use.
The report claims that the Felix is in the very early stages of development, to the point where initial software for the rollable had to be tested on a modified Edge 30 Pro. It seems Motorola didn’t have a working hardware prototype to call upon.
Don’t expect to see the first Motorola rollable smartphone in shops in 2022, in other words.