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(Pocket-lint) – When Motorola brought back the Razr a few years ago, there was a lot of excitement. Undoubtedly fuelled by nostalgic memories of the original which – in its day – was one of the most popular phones in the world.
But then – after releasing a 5G-enabled sequel – things went a bit quiet on the Razr front. Perhaps because – in the face of increasingly competitive devices from Samsung, Motorola realised it couldn’t rely on nostalgia alone to sell the next version. And so – almost two years after the last one – Motorola finally released an updated model. And this one’s actually good.
There’s a lot to like about the latest Razr from Motorola. The company took a couple of years out and addressed a handful of key issues that stopped the previous model from being an instant recommendation.
We now have a proper big screen on the inside (and it’s good), we have a hinge that can hold itself at an angle, and we have a price tag under the magic £1000 mark in the UK. It’s still not cheap, but it is a lot more affordable than the last model, and that’s probably the most important change here.
It has lost some of its Razr styling, and there are other quirks. The software experience doesn’t take full advantage of that flexible display and hinge design, the ultrawide camera is not good at all, and the hinge itself feels a little loose when partially open.
Still, if you’re after a flip phone with flagship power, a large, vibrant screen and good battery life, the Razr is a solid option.
- Big and vibrant display
- No crease
- Fast and smooth performance
- Great battery life
- Much more affordable than previous model
- Not enough software optimisations for folding screen
- Hinge feels a bit wobbly in motion
- Ultrawide and selfie cameras are weak
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Design
- 79.8 x 167.0 x 7.6 mm (unfolded)
- 79.8 x 86.5 x 17.0 mm (folded)
- 200 g – IP52 water-repellent design
The thing we first noticed about the Razr was – when opened – you can almost forget it’s a folding phone. The hinge, in its fully open state, locks into place to create this completely flat candybar form. With that almost invisible crease in the display, and the fact that the display is the same size as a proper flagship Android phone, the experience is very much like using a regular smartphone.
It’s a big improvement on the internal display on the Razr 5G. By comparison, that was small and cramped, especially since it had quite a sizeable notch at the top, and a big chin protruding – and often getting in the way – at the bottom.
In real terms, the display has increased from 6.2-inches to 6.7-inches, and at 20:9 it’s a wider aspect ratio too, giving it a much more expansive feel than its predecessor or, even, the Galaxy Z Flip 4.
That – when combined with quite thick (but even) bezels all the way around it – means the phone is wider than both its predecessor and the competition from Samsung. In fact, it’s wider than most phones, including the hefty iPhone 14 Pro Max and the ROG Phone 6D. But since it folds in half, the phone is still portable enough to carry around easily in your pocket.
One of the really pleasing things about the Razr is that its hinge design allows it to close almost completely flush. There are no big gaps left in between the halves of the display for dust and pocket fluff to get into. If it does, it is IP52 rated to protect against it, and some minimal water protection too – though it’s not as protected as the Galaxy Flip with its IP68 rating.
As much as we do appreciate the new hinge design, it’s not perfect. It locks into place well, and actually holds the screen at different angles without pulling open or falling shut. However, when you are moving it, it feels loose and a bit wobbly, it’s nowhere near as tight and smooth a mechanism we’ve seen from other manufacturers. This doesn’t seem to impact its use negatively, it just doesn’t fill us with a great deal of confidence about its longevity.
It’s a similar feeling you happen to press a little too hard on that middle part of the display where the hinge is, it crackles a bit. In truth though, it’s rare that would ever happen. What does absolutely happen though is that the small gaps around the hinge and caps on either side collect pocket lint.
External screen
- 2.7-inch cover display
- 372 ppi – 800×573 resolution
- Touchscreen
The external display on the Razr 2022 is arguably the one feature that sets it apart from other modern clamshells. It does a lot more than just show you notifications at a glance, or let you scroll through tiny widgets.
Of course, it can do those things. In fact, it does them better, because the large 2.7-inch sizes means it can simply fit more on it. So you can – if you like – view and read your notifications, see the weather forecast, scroll through today’s agenda and use it as a camera viewfinder.
This particular feature – the camera viewfinder – is arguably its best reason for existence. If only because it allows you to use the main camera on the front of the phone for taking selfies, and means you don’t have to rely on the much poorer quality on the hole-punch camera inside the phone.
In addition, you can also open apps in it. That gives you the ability to open messaging apps, read message threads and even reply to them using a small on-screen keyboard if you don’t want to open the main display.
It is worth noting here that not all apps load properly, or are well optimised for this smaller screen. And some aren’t supported at all, but we did find it useful to catch up on missed messages quickly as well as using it as a quick calculator or voice recorder in a pinch.
Main display and media
- 6.7-inch p-OLED display
- 2400 x 1080 – 20:9 – up to 144Hz refresh
- HDR10+ support
- Stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos
There is an inherent downside to flexible displays, and that’s the fact that the flexible protective material – whether it be plastic film, or ‘ultra-thin glass’ or whatever fancy name comes with it – is that they generally aren’t as good at resisting reflections and fingerprints as modern real glass panels. For the Razr – like the Galaxy Flip and Fold – that’s certainly true.
It isn’t terrible thankfully, and the screen can be bright enough that – for the most part – it does cut through, even in bright daylight. But we did find we had to adjust the brightness slider manually quite a lot. The automatic setting was generally too dim a lot of the time, even when there wasn’t all that much light around.
Apart from those minor inconveniences, the display itself is actually very good. We’ve already mentioned the size – 6.7 inches – which definitely helps it feel like a proper, expansive display. But it’s the other qualities that shine through.
It’s bright enough and has deep enough contrast and black levels that it’s compatible with HDR10+ content. It also supports up to 1 billion colours, so you get 10-bit colour depth, and has refresh rates up to 144Hz, but only in certain conditions (read: games).
By default, its adaptive refresh rate is enabled to go up to 120Hz in the user interface, but that can be kicked up to 144 Hz if you’re playing a game that supports those higher rates. The end result, though, is an experience that feels really fluid and responsive. Animations instantly kick into gear when you touch and swipe on the display.
In other words: it’s a great display. It’s vibrant, sharp and has great contrast and colours. It’s very hard to find fault with the display itself.
Where we were left a little nonplussed was with Moto’s conservative approach to optimisations designed for the foldable screen.
With the Galaxy Flip – as an example – Samsung has created a Flex Mode that works in a few different apps, so that you can fold the display to an angle and have useful controls for things like video playback in the web browser, or shooting tools in Instagram. In fact, for a lot of apps, you can set it to automatically push the important stuff up to the top half of the screen when folded upright. With Moto, you don’t get that same flexibility.
With the camera app you do get the control buttons on the bottom and the viewfinder pushed up to the top in a so-called ‘Tripod View’, which is useful. But you don’t get hands-free gestures to take a selfie like you do with Samsung, so you can’t just set it down and hold your hand up to snap a pic of yourself. You also don’t get video controls in the browser if you’re watching it stood on the desk.
It’s like the phone/software was only really designed to be used in its fully open position, which is a little bit of a shame. Of course, that’s how you’re going to use it most of the time anyway. And it is worth mentioning that you can use the split screen mode to have two different apps running: one at the top, and one at the bottom.
Performance and battery life
- Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor
- 8GB RAM – 256GB storage
- 3500mAh battery – 30W wired charging
Like so many other phones this year that we’ve tested that feature the updated Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor, the performance on the latest Razr is impossible to fault. It’s speedy, can cope with the most demanding games, and the aforementioned hinge improvement means it doesn’t matter if you swipe frantically across it, you shouldn’t feel it attempting to bend, fold and close.
It didn’t seem to matter what game we tried on the Motorola, it was quick to load and quick to download any additional data. Gestures on the touchscreen were met with near instant reaction from the animation on screen, at least, when it came to gaming. Where it didn’t have that instant feedback was when typing on the keyboard and giving haptic feedback to confirm we’d ‘pressed’ a key. The ever so slight delay in that feedback was enough that we ended up just switching it off.
Still, the phone handles any demanding like a champ and – even after extended gaming sessions we didn’t feel it get overly warm or start to stutter and lag as those gaming sessions went on.
When you read that a flagship phone with a 120Hz/144Hz display has a 3500mAh battery you might assume battery life was terrible and – we wouldn’t blame you, we thought the same. Except, because it’s a folding phone, the main display isn’t always in use. In fact, even when it is, it doesn’t appear to drain battery quickly, and so we were able to comfortably get through a full day without much trouble.
In fact, the battery life was easily just as good as any standard phone we’ve tested with a 4500mAh-5000mAh. It was never a struggle to get to the end of the day at 11pm after taking it off charge at 7:30am. And when it’s empty you can top it up using the 30W charger that comes in the box. That may not sound like much when you consider some of the fastest charges reach up to 120W, but it’s more than fast enough, especially considering the relatively low capacity of the battery.
Camera – the downside?
- 50MP primary camera – f/1.8 – OIS
- 13MP ultrawide camera
- 8K video recording – HDR10+ recording
- 32MP selfie camera
On paper, the dual camera setup on the Moto Razr 2022 should be fine and – in reality – it is, fine. Perhaps that’s a bit cruel, because – actually – the primary camera is decent enough, offering images with good HDR effect, vibrant colour and contrast.
The main camera – capturing images with its 50-megapixel sensor – is able to use all of its pixels to focus, making that autofocus or tap-to-focus quite quick and easy. Although, it does sometimes struggle a little with moving objects that are close to the lens. Still, apart from slightly unnatural looking bokeh/background blur, the images do look decent.
The advantage of having such a high resolution sensor is that it can offer relatively effective zoom, by cropping into the sensor. You can push all the way out to 8x zoom. But – as you’ll see in the gallery below, the images do look a bit ropey once you get to that extreme end of the zoom length.
As for low light, it’s not a perfect system, but with automatic night mode that comes on as soon as the camera detects low light levels, you can just point and shoot with the main sensor and get a pretty good image, as long as the light levels aren’t very low.
It is the only good camera on the Razr, sadly, and the experience of using the system just isn’t consistent. Results from the ultrawide are – quite frankly – poor. The end images don’t have anything close to the same colouring and balance of the primary lens, it also struggles to capture good detail, with images often coming out very soft. Especially with elements like leaves on trees, or even brickwork. What’s more, the distortion at the edges of the ultrawide lens is quite severe.
Likewise, the selfie camera punched into the tiny hole in the main display isn’t great. It can take okay selfies, but results are often lacking in detail and over-softened without any depth. It’s why we’re glad the cover screen allows you to use the main cameras for selfies if you want, it meant we didn’t have to waste our time with the internal camera.
You will want to disable the automatic beautification, however, since the Motorola phone has it enabled by default. And the over-softened skin that’s produced as a result of that is almost cartoon-like. Portrait mode is decent enough though, offering pretty effective edge detection, and only being confused a little by flyaways.
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There’s a lot to like about the latest Razr from Motorola. The company took a couple of years out and addressed a handful of key issues that stopped the previous model from being an instant recommendation.
Writing by Cam Bunton.
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