Motorola is bracing for the future by returning to the past. The company is adapting its historical flip-phone design for a smartphone with a foldable screen.

Samsung, Huawei and others have phones that fold like a book and offer a double-sized display when unfolded.

Motorola's new Razr phone, on the other hand, will be smaller than a regular smartphone until unfolded to its full 6.2-inch size. The idea is to make the phone more compact for carrying and storing when folded and not in use.

People have been upgrading smartphones less often as innovation slows. The phone industry has been looking to foldable screens as a way to revive sales, though they are still niche products.

Samsung unveiled its foldable phone in San Francisco last November in an attempt to reverse steep declines in profit for its mobile division and restore some of the cachets its brand has lost to Apple. But after Galaxy Fold was reported broken by some industry journalists who had early access this April, the so-called most expensive folding phone hasn't been available to customers until this September.

In Feburary, Chinese tech company Huawei released its Mate X, a foldable 5G-ready smartphone with a price tag of roughly 2,600 U.S. dollars, on the eve of the 2019 Mobile World Congress. The phone has a 6.6-inch screen, which can be opened out into an eight-inch OLED screen to allow the user to read or view videos.

The same thing happened to Huawei as well. The handset was initially set to launch in June, but Vincent Pang, the company's head of corporate communications said on the sidelines of the WSJ Tech D.Live conference in Hong Kong this June that the launch had been delayed. The product still needed extra tests to better ensure the stability of the folding structure and improve the app adaptation. 

However, the latest news on Huawei's official e-commerce platform vmall.com showed that the foldable phone equipped with its self-developed Kirin 980 chips will commence sales at 10:08 a.m. Beijing time on Friday at the price of 16,999 yuan (2,420 U.S. dollars).

(With input from AP)