Review: Motorola Razr+

The first thing you need to do with a flip phone is what I call the flip check. Slide your thumb into the crevice and flip the top half of the phone out. Is it satisfying? Do you feel like you're an action star in a movie taking a Very Important™ call? The new Motorola Razr+ gets close, though you do need some vigor when you flip, and the sound it makes is like cracking knuckles made of laminated paper. Yech.

Still, this folding phone is a massive improvement over the original Razr—er, not that original Razr, but the folding smartphone Motorola debuted in 2020. It looks cute, especially in the Viva Magenta color, and the external display is useful this time around. Best of all, this clamshell Android phone can fit in the smallest pockets.

Folding phones started out as the antidote to the boring, rectangular slabs smartphones have become. But now these flip-and-fold devices themselves look eerily similar. The new Motorola Razr+ sheds the iconic “chin” design and takes a page from Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip4 and Oppo's Find N2 Flip. It looks cleaner and is more functional—the external display is the largest you'll find on a flip smartphone—but the design closely resembles its peers. The saving grace is the ruby color (that's hot) and the vegan leather back. It feels luxe and also keeps the phone from sliding around a desk.

Photograph: Motorola

The front 3.6-inch OLED screen is also what makes this flip special. It's large enough to use some apps and read notifications clearly, and you can customize what panels you want to flip through (get it?) by scrolling left or right. These panels include an app tray, calendar, news, contacts, and weather. My favorite is the Games panel, which has titles like Marble Mayhem, where you need to physically rotate the phone to move a marble through a maze, and Astro Odyssey, an endless runner much like Google Chrome's offline Dinosaur Game. It's a fun and comfortable way to pass the time because you don't need to hold a big-screen phone to play.

You can launch all your apps on this external screen and expand them to take up the whole space, but naturally, things are still cramped. I only found a few apps useful on this screen, like YouTube Music to choose another song, Google Home to control my smart home devices, and even Reddit and Twitter to kill time when I didn't want to open the phone.

Most of the time I stuck to the external screen to keep an eye on the weather and my calendar, not to mention my notifications. I replied to a few messages here and there, but the keyboard takes up the whole screen and feels clunky to use. When you do open up the Razr+, you can seamlessly continue using those apps on the bigger screen. You can also choose what apps stay open on the small screen when you close it up.

The best part of the external display is when you use it with the camera. Twist the phone twice to launch the camera app and you can take high-quality selfies with the superior 12-megapixel primary camera instead of the 32-MP selfie camera on the inside. The screen acts as a viewfinder. Even better, when you unfold the Razr+ and launch the camera app, the person you're photographing can see a preview of themselves on the exterior screen. Everyone I've photographed this way has loved being able to see exactly what they look like, instead of moping about how much they're slouching after the fact.

The Motorola Razr+'s camcorder mode makes it easier to capture stable footage when filming one-handed.

Video: Julian Chokkattu

I also like Motorola's camcorder feature in the camera app. Go to the Video mode, fold the phone to a right angle, and hold the bottom half sideways, like you're holding a camcorder. It feels more stable than the usual way of recording a video with one hand, plus you get to feel like Dad in the '90s.

When the Razr+ is open, it acts like any other 6.9-inch Android phone, with nearly all the top-end features you want. Performance is good, thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset inside with 8 GB of RAM, even if it is last year's top processor. There's 256 GB of internal storage, more than you'll find on competitors at this price, NFC for making contactless payments, and even dual stereo speakers. The capacitive fingerprint sensor on the right edge reacts responsively and is fast to unlock.

Photograph: Motorola

The OLED screen is rather tall, so your fingers will have to stretch to reach the top, but because the phone is narrow, it doesn't feel painful to use. Yes, the part where the screen folds still makes a crease, and it's no less visible than any other folding phone. When you're in an app, it hides pretty well, but you can still feel the bumpy area as you scroll. I've grown to ignore it. More importantly, the display is colorful and sharp, and Motorola has added a 165-Hz screen refresh rate, so interacting with it feels responsive. Sadly, the screen doesn't get too bright, so it can be tough to read on sunny days.

It runs Android 13, and, unlike most other Motorola phones, the company is finally stepping up software support, offering three OS updates and four years of security updates. It's still not as good as the Galaxy Z Flip4, which also has better water resistance (IPX8 vs IP52 on the Razr+), but I'll take any small win.

Battery life is lackluster. The compact nature of this phone means it has a small 3,800-mAh battery capacity. On average days, it got through a full day with 20 percent left by midnight. When I used Google Maps a fair amount, snapped some photos, and streamed music to my car, it hit 15 percent by 8 pm. Power users will need to keep a charger nearby. (There's no charging adapter included in the box.)

Speaking of, I rarely plugged it in—I used wireless charging to keep it topped up. That said, it's important to make sure your wireless charger is compatible. The size and shape of the Razr+ mean certain wireless charging stands might not align with the coils, so you'll have an easier time using a wireless charging pad.

What bugs me most about the Razr+, and what stops me from using it as my forever phone, are the cameras. You can take perfectly fine images, but the 12-MP primary camera and the 13-MP ultrawide are not at the level of other smartphones that cost this much, even cheaper devices like the Google Pixel 7. In low-light scenes, skin tones are off, images can be over-sharpened, and noise creeps in quickly, painting over all the fine details. In the daytime, things are inconsistent. Shadows are sapped away, making everything look flat, and colors are occasionally oversaturated or not the right hue. The resulting images are adequate, but nothing to write home about.

The biggest reason to get a flip phone is its size. If you hate the big phones of today, then you'll appreciate how small the Razr+ is in your pocket, without losing any functionality. Heck, you're gaining some features—you can flip it open to answer a call and close it shut to end one!

However, Samsung's current Galaxy Z Flip4 matches and exceeds the Razr+ in a few ways, and it sometimes dips to $899. Samsung is also expected to announce a new Flip5 this summer, and it's rumored to have a large external screen much like Motorola's phone. I recommend waiting until Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event in the coming month and then making a choice. Unless you've simply always wanted a Razr—I can't deny that it has a better name.