Motorola Razr (2019) Review

Motorola unveiled this in November 2019 and it reached buyers on 6 February 2020, a month late, as a Verizon exclusive with no physical SIM. The idea was irresistible: the Razr flip phone reborn with a 6.2-inch 21:9 pOLED that folds flat with no visible gap, thanks to a hinge that slides the panel into a teardrop so there is no permanent crease, and a 2.7-inch outer screen for notifications, replies and selfies with the main camera.

The engineering of that hinge was real. The rest of the phone was not worth 1,499 dollars. Inside sat a Snapdragon 710 with 6 GB of RAM, a mid-range chip from 2018, and a 2510 mAh battery with 15W charging that struggled to reach the evening. The folding screen had visible bumps and ripples under the plastic, the hinge creaked audibly, and CNET's folding robot gave up at around 27,000 folds when the mechanism stiffened, where the phone's rival survived well past 100,000.

The single 16 MP f/1.7 camera was fine in daylight and poor after dark. It shipped with Android 9 Pie when Android 10 was already five months old; Android 10 arrived nearly a year later, and 11 eventually followed. Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip came out eight days later at 1,380 dollars with a flagship chip, a glass-covered screen and a bigger battery. Motorola replaced the phone with the Razr 5G that September.