If you’re looking to buy a clamshell folding phone, the latest options mostly follow the same design. There’s a large front display that functions like a small phone, unfolding to reveal a large screen with the same aspect ratio as the best smartphones.
The latest addition to the best flip phones comes from Motorola, with the new Razr Ultra 2025, the first true flagship flip phone complete with a large battery, fast charging, and an excellent Cover Display experience.
Outside the US, despite some earlier designs featuring much smaller front screens and triple camera setups, most flip phones also follow a similar design. The outlier to this is the new Huawei Pura X, which changes the aspect ratio of both displays to fit in better cameras and other true flagship specs.
I love the new Motorola Razr Ultra 2025, but after spending some time with the Huawei Pura X, I’m now wondering whether Huawei may be onto something. Here’s why.
Key differences between the Razr Ultra 2025 and Huawei Pura X
The Razr Ultra 2025 features a 4-inch Cover Display protected by Gorilla Glass Ceramic, a 165Hz refresh rate with HDR10+ and Dolby Vision support, and a peak brightness of up to 3,000 nits. The front is dominated by the Cover Display, which seamlessly overlaps the dual camera setup for an all-inclusive display experience.
The Razr Ultra 2025 unfolds to reveal a 7-inch display with the same features, but a higher peak brightness of up to 4,500 nits. The Cover Display has an almost square aspect ratio, while the main display features a 22:9 aspect ratio that’s taller and narrower than most traditional smartphones, which typically have a 19:9 aspect ratio.
Meanwhile, the Huawei Pura X takes a different approach. The Cover Display measures 3.5 inches and is almost square, just like the Razr Ultra, but when you unfold it, you get something truly unique. The 6.3-inch display is smaller than the Razr Ultra 2025, but it features a 16:10 aspect ratio, a first for smartphones, which is commonly used in tablets.
Huawei’s Cover Display is separate from its cameras, which also allows it to include a quad-camera setup. The camera is undoubtedly better than the Razr Ultra 2025, so which company gets it right?
How the Razr Ultra 2025 gets it right
The Razr Plus 2024 was the best flip phone of last year for several reasons, but the main one was Motorola’s approach to the front screen. It’s designed to be the best small phone, and after spending almost a year with it, I found that I use the front display as much as the main display.
The Razr Ultra continues down this same path, increasing brightness, adding an AI key that makes it easy to launch Google Gemini on the front screen (for the first time in flip phones), and comes with additional software features designed to maximize the use of the front screen.
The Razr Ultra 2025 also features two cameras, with a 50MP ultrawide camera paired with a 50MP main camera that uses in-sensor cropping to achieve a 2x optical zoom. The Cover Display is also designed for light gaming, and several games are specifically designed for the front screen experience.
How the Pura X also gets it right
Huawei’s decision to adopt a tablet-size aspect ratio for its main display means that the Pura X is one of the most distinctive flip phones on the market. While most flip phones aim to make smartphones smaller, the Pura X is designed to make a compact tablet experience even more compact.
The Huawei Pura X runs on the homegrown HarmonyOS, which is fast, fluid, and reminiscent of a blend between iOS and Android. Once you install Google Play Services, which takes approximately 10-15 minutes, you’ll enjoy a streamlined experience that seamlessly blends the two distinctive styles of the best folding phones.
The Square Cover Display offers a few shortcuts to key apps, but swiping up allows you to access the full phone, including all of your apps. Imagine a 7-inch tablet experience, but half the size; that’s the Huawei Pura X Cover Display.
Two distinct takes on defining what a flip phone is
Both companies deserve a great deal of credit for creating flip phones with a distinct difference. The Razr Ultra 2025 continues Motorola’s trend of pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with a flip phone Cover Display. Crucially, Motorola has built software experiences specifically to maximize the cover display.
Meanwhile, Huawei has taken a contrarian approach with equally interesting results. Unlike everyone else, Huawei made the conscious decision to adopt a tablet-like experience, and it works extremely well. Yes, the Razr Ultra 2025 has larger displays, but the Pura X has more cameras that likely offer better performance across a wider variety of focal lengths, although we still need to test this.
Which is the ideal flip phone form factor? That’s still to be determined, but one thing is clear: the Huawei Pura X proves that we’ve yet to explore everything possible with flip phones. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
