Motorola Rizr Hands-On: You Gotta Know When To Roll ‘Em – SlashGear

Right off the bat, the obvious cool thing this phone does is expand to make itself bigger. You can expand it by double pressing the power button, but Motorola also worked in a couple of automatic expansion routines. When you’re watching a youtube video and you turn the Rizr horizontally, the phone expands by itself. It retracts when you go back to the home screen.

Similarly, if you’re holding the phone in portrait orientation and you open a compose window in Gmail, the phone automatically expands to give you a larger campus on which you can write. It’s this kind of intuitive thinking that can ultimately allow people to see the utility in a new form factor. People need to use it, so Moto can figure out when the phone should and should not expand on its own.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

The screen also moves down when it needs to. The selfie camera and earpiece are both located under the display, so when you make or receive a call or when you open the selfie camera, the screen drops down slightly to expose those elements. If you’re wondering why the phone doesn’t just always expose those elements even when you don’t need them, it’s because when the phone returns to its normal state, it gives you about as close to a no-bezel experience as you’re going to find on a smartphone.

Of course, I don’t know which of those is preferable. Neither does Moto, which is why it built and is testing these prototypes.