A recent registration with the World Intellectual Property Organisation may have just given us our first look at Lenovo’s Motorola RAZR remake with a folding display. The design, which was filed on December 17th 2018 and first spotted by 91Mobiles, appears to show a device with a folding screen on the inside, alongside a second smaller screen on the outside. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Motorola is intending to relaunch the RAZR as a $1,500 foldable screen smartphone next month.

Although the RAZR name does not appear anywhere on Motorola Mobility’s registration, the design bears an uncanny resemblance to the iconic handset, right down to the thick chin on the bottom of the device. The big change is that on the inside of the phone the old combination of screen and buttons have been replaced with a single long, folding screen, which matches the WSJ’s one detail about the appearance of the upcoming remake.

Grid View When folded in half, what appears to be a smaller secondary display can be seen on the outside of the device. Image: Motorola Mobility LLC

A large chin on the bottom of the device would sit flush with the outside of the phone when folded. Image: Motorola Mobility LLC

Questions about whether Motorola will bring back the RAZR design have been repeatedly raised after HMD licensed the Nokia brand to re-released the Nokia 3310 in 2017 and Nokia 8810 in 2018. Commenting on the appetite for a revival, the RAZR V3’s co-designer Paul Pierce told CNET last month that he thought there was an “opportunity” to resurrect the old phone, but that “it can’t be done just for a gimmick or something of that nature. We’ve got to figure out how to deliver a breakthrough.”

That “breakthrough” could now be here thanks to the advent of folding screens, which will take a step closer to the mainstream next month when Samsung is expected to detail a foldable phone of its own alongside the (non-foldable) Galaxy S10 series. The flexible display technology would allow Motorola’s retro smartphone to have the same flip-phone design as the original RAZR without compromising on a modern interface.

”I think people are kind of yearning for and remembering back to that Razr -- when it flipped open, and the sound of that, the feel of that. Where is that today? And it seems like an opportunity,” Pierce recently explained, “So we’re trying to understand what we can do to revive some of that but it’s got to be done in a way that fundamentally delivers on incredible experience.”