After two weeks with the Motorola Razr 60 Ultra, I already love it more than any other flip phone

Introduction

Motorola must think it’s onto a good thing with its reborn flip phones, and one look at the Razr 60 Ultra should instantly tell you why. The 2025 clamshell hero, being sold as the Razr Ultra 2025 in North America, repeats almost all of the design beats of its predecessor – which itself was a retread of the model before it.

There’s more going on underneath the colourful Pantone-approved surface, though. The latest Snapdragon silicon takes it into true flagship territory; battery capacity has grown by almost 20%; the camera setup once again shows the ultrawide some love; and of course Motorola’s got it’s own take on the AI assistant now.

It’s quite the investment, launching at $1300 / £1100 / €1299. But with Samsung the only other major clamshell player outside of China – and the Z Flip7 not set to arrive for another month or so at the time of writing – might Motorola have just sewn up the category for the foreseeable?

Design & build: material gains

The outgoing Razr 50 Ultra was a stunner of a smartphone, so I can understand Motorola sticking with the same overall styling here. I still think it’s the best-looking clamshell out there, thanks in part to how the outer screen fills the entire front of the phone.

Colour guru Pantone has once again supplied some on-trend hues to help the Razr 60 Ultra stand out, but it’s the new mix of materials that elevate it to supermodel status. The rear panel is made of real wood, vegan leather, or Alcantara, depending on whether you go for the Rio Red, Cabaret, Mountain Trail or Scarab version.

The Mountain Trail model’s natural wood grain seems to be going down best online, with other testers praising its grippy texture and ability to shrug off fingerprints. No reports of splinters, either. The suede-like Alcantara on my dark green Scarab review unit needs a little more TLC – so much so the phone ships with a card with instructions on how to keep it looking its best. After a week of being pulled in and out of my pockets, it certainly accumulated a fair bit of dust. It cleans up wonderfully, though, and really makes the phone feel special in my hand.

Everywhere else the Razr 60 Ultra has sturdiness in spades, with a reinforced titanium hinge that should withstand 35% more folds than the outgoing phone. The outer display uses Gorilla Glass Ceramic, which is way more drop-resistant than Corning’s previous efforts, and the whole thing has an IP48 resistance rating (up from IPX8 last year). That means dust 1mm or larger should be kept out of the delicate hinge. Using it at the beach could still be risky, but this is otherwise as good as it gets for a flip phone right now.

The dimensions haven’t changed all that much, meaning the phone is just under 16mm when closed and 7.2mm when open; still slim enough for the skinniest of skinny jeans pockets, then. The slightly rounded sides of the aluminium frame provide plenty of purchase, and sit more comfortably in your hand than Samsung’s flat-edged Galaxy Z Flip6.

I’m happy to see Motorola stick with the fingerprint-sensing power button, as it’s easy to reach no matter if the phone is flipped open or shut. It was as quick and accurate as I’d expect from a top-tier phone. There’s a face unlock mode too, but not the kind that can authenticate your banking apps.

The one major addition is the new AI button on the opposite side, which wakes the new Moto AI assistant with a press-and-hold. More on that in the software section further down the page.

Screen & sound: perfect pairing

By slimming down the inner screen bezels, Motorola has managed to squeeze 7in of usable pOLED panel inside the Razr 60 Ultra. Unfolded, it dwarfs even the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL I normally fall back to between phone reviews. It’s a tad skinnier, sure, but not to the point your apps or the onscreen keyboard are compromised. Resolution has also climbed to 2912×1224, a big increase over last year’s model (which stuck with 1080p).

Everything looks wonderfully crisp as a result, with the sort of vibrant colours, outstanding contrast and deep, dark black levels I expect from OLED tech. It gets the Pantone Certified tick for colour accuracy, too. Only games will take advantage of the 165Hz maximum refresh rate, but 120Hz everywhere else felt perfectly smooth.

The flexible panel’s crease is very difficult to spot now, so while you feel it when swiping across the screen, it’s in no way distracting when reading web pages or watching videos in landscape. Motorola’s non-removable screen protector also feels more like glass than most folding screens I’ve tried, and doesn’t collect fingerprints super-quickly either. It’s very reflective, but a boost to panel brightness helped keep visibility high even while I was outdoors on especially sunny days.

Motorola claims a peak 4500 nits, which in theory puts the Razr 60 Ultra up there with the best non-folding flagships. In reality that sort of shine only counts for a tiny part of the screen when showing HDR content, but the auto brightness mode still outshone every other flip phone I’ve tested.

The outer screen is pretty much a perfect match for the inner one, with equally dynamic colours, similarly silky 165Hz scrolling, and a tack-sharp 1272×1080 resolution. Brightness has also been hiked to 3000 nits, up from 2400 nits on the old model; similar HDR caveats apply, but again, I had no issues using it outside.

That’s pretty crucial for a flip phone, as it meant I rarely had to open it up for things like checking notifications, reading emails, or changing music tracks. The on-screen keyboard was comfortable enough to type out full sentences with no typos, and you’re free to pick which apps appear here – a much better approach than Samsung’s widget-first flip phones.

I was also impressed with the Razr 60 Ultra’s audio game. It gets properly loud, with the earpiece tweeter and down-firing main speaker only needing 30% volume for me to hear everything clearly while cooking dinner; most phones typically need 50%, so for a flip phone to be so punchy is a great effort.

Cameras: the bigger picture

After ditching the ultrawide secondary snapper in favour of a dedicated telephoto for last year’s Razr 50 Ultra, Motorola has brought it back here. The 50MP main lens (which uses a physically larger sensor than before for better light-gathering abilities) now uses cropping for 2x zoom shots and beyond, for a ‘best of both worlds’ approach.

There’s a third 50MP sensor hole-punched through the inner screen, though it’s largely for video call duties; the big benefit of flip phones is being able to compose using the external screen better quality selfies from the outer cameras. I also like that Motorola makes the most of the form factor with a camcorder mode when you hold the phone horizontally half-open, and a cartoon mode for the external screen when taking portraits of subjects who refuse to look at the camera normally. It worked a treat on my easily distracted one-year-old.

Image quality is about as good as I’ve seen from any flip phone, with consistently colourful and detail-packed shots. Sharpening is perhaps a little aggressive at times, leaving foliage and brickwork looking unnaturally crisp in pursuit of clarity, but you wouldn’t notice unless you went searching for it. More obvious is Motorola’s favouring of highlights over shadow detail; dynamic range has improved slightly over last year’s phone, but the algorithms still leave some scenes looking darker than they were in reality. I quite liked how it made some of my snaps look moodier, but others would’ve benefitted from a more even exposure.

Cropped 2x zoom shots held up very well, but things started to get very crunchy at 4x and beyond. If you’re not able to get closer to your subject, a non-folding flagship with a dedicated telephoto lens is going to fare better at longer distances. That’s especially true in low light, where the Motorola does a fine job at 1x – with just a bit of noise appearing in the darkest of scenes – but falling off rapidly once digital zoom comes into play.

The ultrawide is a very close match for the main sensor, with a near-identical colour treatment, exposure and definition. It doesn’t have optical image stabilisation, so you’ve got to be a bit more controlled when the light drops, and I’ve seen ultrawides with sharper edge definition, but I can’t deny the Razr squeezes an awful lot into every scene. So much so, in fact, I wanted the main sensor to have a tighter focal length. 22mm is wider than the Pixel 9 Pro XL, iPhone 16 Pro Max and Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Macro close-ups from the ultrawide can be rather impressive if you get the focusing distance right. I wish Moto (and others) would include zebra striping in their camera apps to make macros that little bit easier to nail first time. In all other respects, though, there’s little here that’ll make you feel like a second class photography for buying a flip phone instead of a candybar one.

Software experience: Hello AI

Motorola’s more recent takes on Android have been a bit more hands-on than they used to be, yet the firm still manages not to overload you with features right from the off. The Razr 60 Ultra has plenty of gesture shortcuts and customisation options if you go looking for them, but you’re otherwise looking at fairly stock software. Some fonts, icons and menu layouts aside, most Google Pixel owners would feel right at home.

It’s largely Google’s apps you’ll find installed as standard, with just a few of Motorola’s offerings feeling like dupes. Others like Smart Connect (which lets you share content wirelessly and control the phone from a PC) Moto Unplugged (essentially a distraction-free mode that limits you to just essential apps) and Family Space (which locks down app access before you pass your phone to a youngling) are niche, but useful if they apply to you.

Moto AI is the big new addition. It has shown up in a few Motorola phones now, but the Razr is the first to get a dedicated button for launching it. A press-and-hold wakes the assistant, putting tools like ‘Remember This’ and ‘Take Notes’ onscreen. The former puts an image or screengrab into memory, so you can ask the AI about it later; the latter makes an audio recording with near-instant transcription. ‘Update me” summaries all your recent notifications, but it’s not great at understanding context right now.

Image Studio and Playlist studio use the cloud to generate images and music playlists, though only for Amazon Music currently. The voice assistant can use the Perplexity AI model for its responses, but I fared better with Google Gemini. It’s early days for the tools, so it’ll be interesting to see how Motorola improves on them in the future.

It’s a shame the firm hasn’t stepped up its game on long-term software support, though. Rivals now offer seven years of new Android generations and security patches; the Razr 60 Ultra will get just three of the former and four of the latter.

Performance & battery life: flagship worthy

Motorola has stepped out of its comfort zone for the Razr 60 Ultra, going with a true top-tier chipset rather than step-down silicon. You’re getting a Snapdragon 8 Elite here, paired with a generous 16GB of RAM, which should put it head to head with non-folding flagships for sheer performance muscle.

Single- and multi-core scores of 1738 and 6874 in Geekbench put it comfortably ahead of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6, and a close match to some non-folding phones, though my handset did get toasty rather quickly while under load. That meant traditional flagships still carved out a comfortable lead, but in daily use I couldn’t fault the Razr’s performance. Apps open pretty much instantly, there’s zero lag or latency when swiping or scrolling, and multitasking wasn’t an issue either.

Gaming was rather impressive, too. I saw 3Dmark scores of 11,116 and 5734 in the Solar Bay and Wild Life Extreme tests, again trading blows with top-tier phones. More casual 3D fare like Lovecraftian fishing game Dredge was nigh-on faultless, and the Razr can manage rounds of Call of Duty Mobile without dropping frames. Again though, the phone did get warm with prolonged play; hardcore players may find they’re better off with a non-folding phone instead.

The more potent chipset hasn’t arrived at the expense of battery life, either. On the contrary, Motorola has found room for a 4700mAh cell – a significant increase from the Razr 50 Ultra’s meagre 4000mAh unit. The result is a real turn up for flip phone lifespans. Over 15 hours of screen-on time in synthetic testing puts it at a huge advantage over the Galaxy Z Flip6, which had conked out before the eleven hour mark.

In real-world testing, I comfortably lasted into a second day (thanks in part to only opening the phone when I really needed to). On a day spent using the inner screen exclusively, I still got to bedtime without needing to plug in – and that was with a mix of photography, gaming, video playback and music streaming.

Motorola still has the edge when it comes to flip phone charging speeds. The Razr 60 Ultra sucks down 68W from compatible power bricks (you don’t get one in the box) so needs barely over an hour for a full refuel. Wireless charging is a welcome inclusion, too, even if it’s a fair bit slower at 30W.

Motorola Razr 60 Ultra verdict

The Razr 60 Ultra doesn’t dramatically shake up Motorola’s flip phone formula – but then it didn’t really need to. No other clamshell is as convenient to use while closed, and the firm’s stripped-back take on Android remains first class once you open the thing up. The new AI additions are useful without being overwhelming, too.

Moto has improved the hardware in all the right places, with stellar performance, simply superb real-world battery life, and a pair of cameras that legitimately challenge for class honours. The screens are suitably top-tier, and the eclectic mix of colours and materials give it some welcome extra personality.

It remains to be seen whether Samsung will have a price advantage once the Z Flip7 arrives, but I doubt it’ll compete with the Motorola on battery or outer screen usability. It’s the Razer I’d rather have in my pocket.

Motorola Razr 60 Ultra technical specifications