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5 awesome things you can do on the Motorola Razr Plus cover screen

Pocket Casts app running on the Motorola Razr Plus cover screen.
Joe Maring/Digital Trends

The Motorola Razr Plus is easily one of the best, if not the best, flip phones right now. The 3.6-inch cover display is the biggest you can get on a clamshell foldable, and Motorola has put in serious efforts to utilize the outer screen to its full potential — unlike what Oppo did with its Oppo Find N2 Flip.

I’ve had the Razr Plus for a week now, and I keep discovering new ways to utilize the cover display. Here are five awesome things that you can do with it.

Moo time is the best

Motorola offers nine different clock styles for you to choose from for the cover screen, and “Moo time” is the best. It’s a character (Moo, I believe) that sits on your cover screen. It’s not a still image. Moo is intuitive and reacts to your taps. You’ll never get bored of it because it also changes with the time of the day.

For instance, around 7 a.m., it’s brushing its teeth, and when you tap on it, it blows a kiss on the screen. In the afternoon, it’s having coffee, resting, or working on a laptop – depending on the time of the day. In the evening, I see it coming back from work on a subway. It’s very intuitive and playful. I love Moo.

Here’s how to select the Moo time clock style:

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Go to External Display.
  3. Tap Lock screen clock faces.
  4. Select Moo time.

Run any app you like

Motorola Razr Pus cover screen apps.
Prakhar Khanna/Digital Trends / Digital Trends

This is something that Oppo could have done with the Find N2 Flip, but instead, it limited the screen to just widgets. Instead of having a preset for apps, you can select any apps you want to use on the cover screen. From YouTube to Microsoft Teams to social media apps like Twitter and Instagram, you can run it all.

I’ve found it extremely useful when I want to respond to messages on Teams or WhatsApp. All I need to do is tap on the notification, and it opens the chat. Tap on the text box, and you get a full-fledged keyboard to type on with no limitations. I don’t feel uncomfortable typing on the cover display because it’s not cramped.

Quickly replying to a message on a small display not only saves time from unfolding but also keeps things focused. I don’t find myself mindlessly scrolling social media after replying to texts. I send a message and slide the phone back. You can run YouTube, too, if you like. I won’t recommend it, though, because there’s a 6.9-inch display on the inside to watch content on.

Here’s how you can select the apps you want to use on the cover screen:

  1. Unlock your phone but keep it folded.
  2. Swipe once to the right.
  3. Tap on the Pencil icon in the top right corner.
  4. You’ll get a list of almost all the installed apps.
  5. Tap to select the ones you need on the cover screen.
  6. Tap on the Tick icon at the top-right corner.
  7. You’ll have all the selected apps on the Apps screen of the cover display.

Capture good-looking selfies with rear cameras

Motorola Razr Plus rear camera selfie
Prakhar Khanna / Digital Trends

The selfie cameras on most Android phones aren’t great – that’s one of the reasons I was a fan of the Asus Zenfone 8 Flip design. It allowed me to take selfies with the primary camera, not a watered-down front-facing one, and gave me a fullscreen viewfinder. The Oppo Find N2 Flip was the first time since then that I was able to use rear cameras to click selfies with a good viewfinder.

The Motorola Razr Plus takes it to the next level by letting me quickly access the camera with a twist of the wrist. No need to unlock and tap on the Camera icon for the app to launch; just a twist is enough. It adds to the overall experience. I’ve been able to use the rear cameras as selfie shooters while also having a full-screen viewfinder, and it’s been a fantastic experience.

Games made for the cover display

Motorola Razr Plus cover screen game.
Prakhar Khanna/Digital Trends

The Motorola Razr Plus comes with seven pre-installed games with the option to download more. You get Marble Mayhem, Astro Odyssey, Stack Bounce, and more. To download more games, you need to flip open the phone and choose the ones you like.

I like Marble Mayhem which moves the marble as you turn and rotate the phone. Astro Odyssey is like the dinosaur game you get on Chrome when the internet isn’t working. I’m not much of a person who plays games on phones, but these are good timekillers for when the internet isn’t working, or you’re bored and just want to kill a few minutes.

Lots of customization options

Motorola Razr Plus panels.
Prakhar Khanna/Digital Trends

Most flip phones offer a few widgets for their cover screen … and that’s about it. But Motorola lets you customize the Razr Plus’s cover screen to your liking. You can choose from a variety of “panels,” which are essential widgets designed precisely for the cover screen.

You get an app launcher, contacts, calendar, weather, games, Spotify, Google Fit, and Google News to choose from. These are all pretty self-explanatory. The only annoyance here is for YouTube Music or Apple Music users. You only get to have a Spotify panel on the cover screen, and that’s it.

Here’s how to customize panels:

  1. Unlock your phone.
  2. Tap and hold on the cover screen.
  3. You’ll get a menu with three options: Manage panels, Wallpapers and shortcuts, and Lock screen clock face. Tap on the first one.
  4. A horizontal list of panels will appear. From here, you can drag and drop the ones you want on the screen.
  5. Tap on the tick icon in the top right corner.

This is how all cover screens should be

The Home Screen of the Motorola Razr Plus cover screen.
Joe Maring/Digital Trends

The Motorola Razr Plus cover screen helps it stand out from all the other clamshell foldables. The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 is rumored to have a big cover display to rival Motorola’s, but we don’t know if you’ll be able to do quite as much with it; rumor has it that may not entirely be the case.

Regardless of what Samsung does, the Razr Plus remains a striking example of how every company making a folding flip phone should handle the cover screen. Keep your small displays and limited widgets. Give me a big screen, tons of settings, and the freedom to do whatever I want with it.

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Prakhar Khanna
Prakhar writes news, reviews and features for Digital Trends. He is an independent tech journalist who has been a part of the…
I used Motorola and Samsung folding phones. Only one gets this feature right
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Motorola Razr Plus folded in hand.

Software plays a crucial role in any device, but it becomes even more important when you have a limited amount of screen space to interact with the user interface. The Motorola Razr series has always been better than the Galaxy Z Flip lineup in terms of usability when folded. This year, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 5 closes the gap between the two clamshell foldables by offering a big cover screen.

But sporting a big outer display doesn’t immediately make a flip phone foldable a whole lot more useful; case in point – the Oppo Find N2 Flip, where Oppo gave us six widgets (and added a couple more later) to play around with and called it a day. While Samsung brings 13 widgets to the table, the cover screen software is still not on par with the Motorola Razr Plus.

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Samsung messed up the Galaxy Z Flip 5’s most important feature
Two Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 phones next to each other.

Samsung just held its latest Galaxy Unpacked July 2023 event in Seoul, Korea, and it was packed with a ton of new upcoming products. We have the next generation of foldables with the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5, as well as the Galaxy Watch 6 series and Galaxy Tab S9 lineup.

But let’s take a closer look at the Galaxy Z Flip 5, which is hot on the heels of the latest Motorola Razr Plus. Both flip phones are pretty similar with that larger cover display, but unfortunately, this is where Samsung really fumbled the ball.

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Motorola’s folding phone just had a durability test — and it’s painful to watch
Motorola Razr 40 Ultra broken cover screen.

Motorola’s latest clamshell foldable, the Motorola Razr Plus, has won well-deserved praise for its design and the functionally rewarding cover screen that occupies almost one-half of the rear panel. In my brief time with the phone, I felt that Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Z Flip 5 will have a hard time beating this one.
Praise aside, it looks like the Razr Plus' top selling point could also be its undoing. Zack Nelson of JerryRigEverything put the phone through his customarily brutal stress and bend test, and the Razr Plus failed at an unexpected point.
This has NEVER happened before...
While applying pressure on the rear side of the phone to check the hinge strength, the lower edge of the cover display breaks rather awkwardly. First, the screen shatters, and then, the glass assembly can be seen caving inside.
“Never have we ever been able to break a screen with a single finger,” says Nelson. However, it appears that the cover screen’s fragility has more to do with the gap underneath than the structural integrity of the glass itself.
It seems the area right above the hinge is hollow, which means putting pressure on the cover display could damage the screen, as there is no solid support underneath. Simply put, don’t put the phone in the back pocket of your denim jeans, and take care about putting heavy objects over the phone.
What’s really surprising is that unlike the Google Pixel Fold’s fragile frame and hinge mechanism, the Motorola Razr Plus didn’t show any such signs of damage. There was no permanent damage recorded due to the phone bending in the reverse direction, and the flexible OLED screen also remained intact.

It’s quite paradoxical that the cover display — which Motorola markets as the Razr Plus's standout feature — is also the part that is uncannily fragile. But the rest of the package seems solid.
Motorola told Digital Trends in an emailed interview that the Razr Plus ships “with an optimized inner structure stacking and stronger housing design” and that it also features “the industry’s first dual-axis tracking in the teardrop hinge.”
Compared to the previous-generation Razr foldable phones, this one can survive 400,000 folding cycles, twice that of its predecessors. It’s a great phone, and if you want to see how it stands out, Digital Trends Prakhar Khanna had some fun with its cover screen to see everything that it can accomplish. And it's great! So long as you don't accidentally shatter it like this.

Read more