When I walked into the briefing room at this week’s Motorola event, I jokingly asked Doug Michau, the company’s executive director of North America business development, if he was excited to get a temporary reprieve from constantly being asked when there would be a new Razr. Indeed, the last one that we saw in the U.S. came out in 2020, and its 2022 successor was a China exclusive.
If you’re a fan, as so many of us, today’s the big day. The 2023 Motorola Razr and Razr+ have finally arrived. After spending some time with both devices, I have to say that I’m really impressed.
I’ll start where Motorola ended in its briefing: the price. When the company confirmed the two models, I expected the lesser Razr to cost $999, competing with Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip series. However, given that it’s actually the Razr+ that’ll cost $999, that really puts the ball in Samsung’s court.
Moto didn’t announce pricing for the base Razr, which I don’t understand. With a Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, a smaller cover display, and lesser RAM and storage, this phone could potentially be sold for as little as $699, and that’s not even including how often Motorola phones are discounted. That can disrupt Samsung in a big way, which makes the decision to nfeel odd.
But enough about the price. Let’s talk about the Razr+
That cover display on the Motorola Razr+ though
While the regular Razr has a 1.5-inch pOLED display that’s similar to what you’d find on a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, the Razr+ has a 3.6-inch pOLED screen that spans across the covers and around the cameras. It looks like a modern smartphone display, stretched from bezel to bezel.
It’s such a drastic difference from the flip-style cover displays we’ve seen in the past. With previous options, which have pretty much come from Samsung and Motorola in the U.S., you won’t do much on the display. These screens are limited with widget views for specific tasks, or they’re small enough that you can’t do anything complicated on them.
The Motorola Razr+ has a cover display that’s actually useful. You can actually do the things you would on a phone, without having to open it. In fact, Motorola even showed off games.
The 1066×1056 display has a 144Hz refresh rate though, so gaming is definitely smooth. Max brightness comes in at 1,100 nits (1,400 nits on the main display), but auto-brightness seemed a little buggy. The demo area of this event was in bright sunlight, and I actually had to turn these phones to max brightness to photograph them.
Out of the gate, the cover screen has various widgets and app groups. All you have to do is swipe up from the clock screen that’s shown by default, and you can do whatever you want.
A neat feature extra feature here is a continue button on the screen when you close it. Want to take a guess at what this does? That’s right. It lets you continue from where you left off.
An example might be if you open up the phone to plot a route in Google Maps, and then you close the phone but still want to follow the route. You just hit the continue button when you close it, and it’ll do just that. This works for any app, so it’s just a matter of if you’re willing to use it on a smaller display.
The screen on the regular Motorola Razr is less exciting. It’s comparable to what we’ve seen from other flip-style foldable smartphones.
Fun camera features
It just wouldn’t be a flip-style foldable phone launch without some “your tripod is always with you” messaging. So yes, the Motorola Razr+ can do those things, but actually a bit more.
There’s a dual-view feature that shows the view on both screens. That way both the subject and the photographer can see what the lens sees. This can be turned on or off, obviously, and that same toggle lets you show some funny animated faces that are meant to make the subject smile.
It has the other capabilities you’d expect from a flip-style foldable, such as being able to use the main camera to take a selfie without opening the phone. Motorola did tout the new 32MP front camera and the fact that it can record 4K 60FPS video though, a feature that’s also available on the main sensor (although not on the ultrawide sensor).
You can also set the hinge anywhere between 45 and 130 degrees, so you can place it on a table and have it take a picture of you, as we’ve seen in foldable demos so many times.
The inside of the phones
The main display of both phones is a 6.9-inch 2640×1080 pOLED screen. It’s a big increase in resolution from the previous generation Razr 5G, which only featured a 2142×876 resolution.
That previous-gen model was also smaller, with a 6.2-inch display instead of the newer 6.9-inch screen. That’s because the iconic chin is gone. Earlier versions of this device capitalized on nostalgia for the flip phone that was popular in the early 2000s. The devices themselves weren’t particularly great, but everyone was just excited about rebooting a classic flip phone as a foldable screen Android device.
Now, Motorola has moved on from that design. The display is edge-to-edge, as it should be.
The new Motorola Razr design is slick
I really like the design of both of the devices, although I do wish we knew the price of the regular Razr to make it easier to put in context. We’ve seen a lot of $699 Motorola devices that are pretty much permanently on sale for $499, and if that were the case here, that would give Motorola a serious leg up on its competition, which at this point is mostly Samsung.
But I digress. As for the design, there are six color options. The Razr+ comes in Infinite Black, Glacier Blue, and Viva Magenta. The former two have a matte glass back, while the latter is vegan leather. Viva Magenta won’t be sold on AT&T; that’s for T-Mobile, of course, but you can also buy it unlocked at Motorola.com. The regular Razr comes in Sage Green, Vanilla Cream, and Summer Lilac.
It’s really nice to see actual color options for this phone. I was so disappointed that Motorola introduced its newest actual flagship, the Edge+, and it only came in black.
Motorola promised a gapless design on the Razr and Razr+, which is mostly accurate. It accomplishes this with slightly raised bezels, similar to what Google did with the Pixel Fold. It’s a necessary evil. With the kind of soft display that’s needed to fold, getting something trapped in there could cause significant damage, so there needs to be some kind of gap.
Motorola is exciting again
I can’t tell you how many headlines I’ve read over the last few years that exclaimed that “Motorola is back.” It’s true that the company fell off for a few years. The Moto Z was the flagship line following the Moto X’s tenure, but then the Moto Z3 had the same specs as the Z2, but with a bigger screen. The theme there was just a 5G Moto Mod that would be sold by Verizon. The Z4 was just a straight-up mid-range phone.
This was followed by a period of promises to reenter the flagship space from Motorola. The Razr arrived as a very expensive device that was not practical for anybody thanks to a lot of first-gen issues. The next year, Motorola made a real flagship phone with the Edge+, but while it got decent reviews, it disappeared from the conversation rather quickly.
I don’t know if the current Edge+ will remain in the best phone conversation, but the 2023 Motorola Razr series seems like a winner. The energy at the briefing was a bit different from what I felt at previous Motorola events. It felt exciting. Despite so many leaks, everyone still seemed to be impressed with what Motorola had to show, and whether it can compete in the foldable phone market.
The Motorola Razr+ will be available for preorder on June 16 for $999, shipping on June 23. The regular Razr pricing and availability aren’t available yet.