Motorola Razr hits Telstra stores – but I wouldn’t buy one

Would you buy a product that the company isn’t willing to have reviewed?

This may be a whole lot of inside-Baseball kinda talk, but when new mobile phones are launched, there are normally a handful set aside to be sent out to people like me to check out. Use. Review.

Even the smallest brands you’ve never heard of do it – like Vivo. Heck even Mintt who no-one had heard of does it.

Of course the bigger names, Samsung, Apple, Oppo, Huawei, Alcatel, TCL – they do it to.

Why? So when you’re thinking of buying a product, you can read what a few reviewers think, and make up your own mind.

Well, the Motorola Razr went on sale in late February, didn’t ship to customers until somewhere in March and has slowly trickled out to customers since then.

Today, they announced it’s available from Telstra too! Big Win.

Sadly, Samsung got a leg up on them and got their phone in stores on basically the same day. Samsung also went to the trouble of loaning devices to reviewers like me, my mate Stephen Fenech, and many more across Australia, so we can tell you what we like and don’t like, you can make an informed decision on that.

When a company says they’re not planning to run a review program, alarm bells go off.

Of course, in a time of short supply, it’s critical to prioritise customers, but I think even the best of us accept that even if there are only 2 or three devices floating around, and we can use them for just a few days (as was the case last year with Samsung’s Galaxy Fold), we’d be happy with that.

But, with Motorola seeming to skip straight to retail, and stick with the sales that come from just the hype – we’ll never really know if they might have sold more – or in fact less.

Bottom line, if you want a smartphone that folds in half, get the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip – I love it, and it’s $2,199. The Razr, I love the sound of, I love the nostalgia of, but at $2,699 it’s impossible to recommend.