Motorola Razr Fold review: Looking for an edge – Ars Technica

Motorola was early to foldable phones, announcing its first Razr-branded foldable in 2019. Since then, the company has churned out a series of foldable flip phones, but the new Razr Fold is its first attempt at a tablet-style foldable. Samsung, Google, and others have been making devices like this for a while, so we know the formula, and the Razr Fold doesn’t change the game.

Like the competition, the Razr Fold has flagship specs and a giant foldable display that fits in your pocket. It also comes with a hefty $1,900 price tag. While Motorola has made progress overcoming some traditional shortcomings of foldables, the phone still feels rather impractical, while still being very cool.

Is “cool” enough reason to spend almost two grand on a phone, though?

Living up to the name

The Razr Fold lives up to its flip-phone namesake—the device is pretty slim for a foldable, measuring 10.1 mm when closed and 4.7 mm when open. It’s not as svelte as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, but it beats the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold. The weight also falls right in the middle at 243 g. Motorola has a lot of experience with hinges, and the Razr Fold reflects that. The movement feels smooth, and the hinge can be held at almost any angle without wobbling. When open, the phone is very nearly flat. It’s a few degrees shy of perfect, but it’s closer than Samsung’s Fold 7.

The phone feels solid, but it doesn’t carry the same durability rating as most other flagship smartphones. It’s IP49-rated, which means it’s water-sealed but not resistant to dust and particulates. That could be a problem for a device with a movable hinge.

Because the Fold has buttons on both edges, you get a somewhat cluttered arrangement when the device is closed. The volume buttons are near the top, and the AI button is right next to them. It’s textured differently, which helps a bit, but I’ve still accidentally pressed it on a few occasions. The power button is below that, so it’s easier to find by touch. It’s not wobbly, but there’s very little tactility, making it hard to know when you’ve pressed it. There’s a fingerprint sensor in the button as well. It’s fast and accurate—no complaints there.

The external 6.6-inch display is tall but usable thanks to the slim bezels. The soft-touch plastic back has a grippy texture, which is also appreciated on a device you have to torque to open and close. The current Samsung and Google foldables are too smooth to feel totally stable in your hand.

The rear cover tapers up to the camera module, which is the thickest part of the phone. The bulge makes the device a bit top-heavy, but the placement makes it surprisingly stable when sitting on a table. It doesn’t rock as much as most phones, foldable or not.

The frame’s subtle chamfers give the two halves a slightly rounded profile, making it easy to grip when flipping open the main display. It’s an 8.1-inch pOLED with 6,200 nits of brightness and 2,232 x 2,484 pixels. It looks excellent, and there’s almost no crease visible down the middle. The colors are vibrant, and the 120 Hz refresh rate ensures smooth animations. This is still a flexible OLED with a plastic cover, though, and it’s soft, so even a fingernail can damage the surface. The screen is also extremely reflective, so even with the super-high brightness, it’s a challenge to read in bright outdoor light.

While Samsung has ditched its stylus support in foldables, Motorola is adding that to the package for its first big foldable. The Moto Pen Ultra is a $100 accessory for the Fold (free with preorders), which probably makes it a non-starter. That said, it works well. It’s a powered stylus with a neat little charging case, and it’s easy to pair with the Fold. A built-in note-taking app offers solid handwriting recognition, and the nub on the end is soft enough not to damage the display. It also works on both the cover screen and the internal foldable panel.

Moto AI still reigns

The Razr Fold comes with Motorola’s customary build of Android 16. The interface hasn’t diverged too much from a stock Android experience, but it’s not as low-clutter as it once was. For starters, there’s a bit more pre-loaded bloatware. There’s LinkedIn, a duplicative note-taking app, Facebook, Instagram, and more. You can uninstall or disable all that stuff, but you’re stuck with the AI.

Like last year’s models, Motorola’s 2026 foldables come with a suite of AI features from multiple vendors. Gemini is included, of course, and Google has worked to make sure its robot can do all the usual AI tasks. As a result, much of what Motorola baked in duplicates features already available through Gemini.

For example, the phone’s AI menu includes Microsoft’s Copilot Vision, which is just a worse version of Gemini Live. Perplexity’s AI search is integrated, too. There’s also “Pay Attention” AI recording and summarization and the “Catch Me Up” notification summarizer.

You can access most of these features via the AI button on the left edge of the phone (when open). This pop-up also offers the general Moto AI “Ask and search,” chatbot, which can call on the various Moto AI features. If you’re going to interact with a chatbot on your phone, though, Gemini will likely perform better. The AI button cannot be remapped—your only options are Moto AI or nothing.

Motorola’s approach to AI still feels scattershot. No one is sure what AI features will make sense on smartphones, and Moto is basically throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. As long as you can avoid pressing the AI button by mistake, you can ignore most of Moto’s AI features, and the rest of the software experience is solid.

Android 16 on the Razr Fold includes a dash of liquid glass, but it’s overall an understated version of Android with consistent looks and well-designed foldable features. It has easy-to-open apps in split-screen via saved app pairs, the taskbar, or long-press menus. There’s support for floating apps, and it’s great that you can do both horizontal and vertical splits without rotating the device, which you have to do with Pixels.

It would be nice if you could change the size of the split apps, but the only options are an even split or a mode where one app hides behind the other for quick switching. This works with up to three apps, which is neat but probably not very useful in daily use.

People are increasingly buying phones like appliances, expecting many years of service before a replacement is necessary. Foldables may have durability issues in the long term, but the Razr Fold has a reasonable update policy. Moto is promising seven years of updates for this phone, just like Samsung and Google. The Razr flip phones are limited to three OS updates and five years of security patches.

A flagship in RAMageddon

Every flagship phone is fast enough these days, but they don’t take full advantage of their powerful application processors if all you’re doing is scrolling Instagram. Foldables let you put that hardware to use by running multiple apps. The Razr Fold has the latest and greatest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 paired with 16GB of RAM, a luxury in this age of RAMageddon.

The Razr Fold fast-swaps between multiple live apps on the screen, and its ample RAM reliably keeps apps in memory. However, most third-party apps need a restart to resize if you’ve opened or closed the phone since using them in the other state.

Benchmarks don’t always tell the whole story, but they can be helpful for comparing devices. Despite having market-leading specs, the Razr doesn’t benchmark very well, running behind similarly equipped devices (it’s closer to last year’s Snapdragon chip). The processor may be tuned for greater efficiency, or it may just not crank up the speed when benchmark apps run (a common tactic to increase scores), but these are the numbers.

These scores don’t necessarily mean the phone is sluggish—it feels pretty fast in daily use. We’re talking about something that costs almost two grand, though, and any compromise is a potential problem.

Motorola is the second phone maker, after OnePlus, to bring silicon-carbon batteries to the US. That means more juice in the same space, giving the Razr Fold a total capacity of 6,000 mAh. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 has just 4,400 mAh, and the Pixel foldable is a hair over 5,000. The Razr won’t run for days on a charge, but it is more comfortably an “all-day” phone. You don’t have to worry as much about using the larger display or making sure it’s completely charged before leaving the house.

But even with less range anxiety, you’ll still have to charge the Razr Fold every day. The upshot is that the phone charges much faster than other foldables. With a compatible USB-C adapter, you can reach 80 W, though only when the phone is open and nearly empty. Still, you can get enough power to head out the door with a few minutes of charging. Wireless charging is similarly fast, topping out at 50 W. Motorola confirms it’s not selling a charger to do that, though, so it seems odd to list it on the spec sheet. The phone will charge slower on a standard Qi-compatible pad.

Improved cameras

Motorola has struggled to compete with the cameras on Samsung and Google phones, but the Razr Fold does mark an improvement for the company. It sports a trio of 50 MP sensors—no 12 MP also-rans here. The primary shooter is a Sony Lytia sensor with big, 2.44 μm pixels, joined by a 50 MP ultrawide and a 50 MP 3x telephoto. There are 32 MP selfie cameras peeking through the external and internal displays, too.

A long-standing issue with Moto’s cameras has been their slow shutter speed, which made it hard to capture moving subjects. The Razr Fold’s primary camera is noticeably faster. It’s not as capable as Google’s Pixel phones, but you still have a reasonable chance of getting a non-blurry shot of a wiggly kid or pet.

Some photos I’ve taken with the Razr look undeniably great—they’re sharp, detailed, and well-exposed. In general, Motorola has also gotten better at handling wide dynamic range, bringing out details in both light and dark areas. Images are good in middling light, but Motorola’s night mode photography still trails the competition.

The improvements seem to come at the expense of processing time, though. The previews you see in the camera are often very different from what you get once all the optimization is done. And there are drawbacks to that, too. Some images can look very overprocessed, with oddly sharp edges and muddied fine lines. It’s a bit like those early Pixel HDR images that produced halos around objects.

Having high-resolution secondary sensors on a foldable is still not guaranteed, so it’s good to see Moto trying here. The 50 MP ultrawide captures a ton of detail, though processing can crush some of it in busy scenes. The 122-degree frame is pretty wide, but there’s very little edge distortion.

As usual, a 3x telephoto doesn’t provide much reach, but the Razr’s solid resolution gives you some leeway if you want to crop down for a better frame. It won’t look amazing, but you’ll be able to see what’s going on. However, the telephoto seems to be compensating for its narrower aperture by boosting colors in a way that looks a bit artificial.

Is this the foldable you’ve been waiting for?

No matter the device, $1,900 for a phone is a big ask. Foldables are not new, and after the better part of a decade, it’s clear these large-format devices won’t be getting cheaper. If anything, phones of all sizes are becoming more expensive due to escalating component prices. Is the functionality there to justify spending almost $2,000 on a phone?

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