Motorola has another foldable phone up its sleeve, and it’s not just an iterative upgrade. The Motorola Razr broke cover alongside the Motorola X30 and X30 Pro, the company’s candy bar flagships for the year.
Teasers came fast and furious in the lead-up to the phone, and the third time just might be the golden charm for Motorola’s foldable phone ambitions. In short, Motorola’s trying to fix everything that was poor about the prior foldable. A weak processor? Gone. It’s swapping in a more powerful chip to compete with phones like the Galaxy Z Flip 4. A decent camera that’s more suited to a Moto G-series phone? Poof. Here’s a set of flagship-class cameras. Add a smooth-as-silk 144Hz display, up to 12GB of RAM, and a large 3,500mAh battery, and Motorola has made quite an attractive phone in brief.
Here’s everything we know so far about the Motorola Razr 2022.
Design and display
The first two Motorola Razr foldable phones clung too tightly to the nostalgia factor, with an elevated chin at the bottom that was lifted straight from the classic Razr clamshell phones of the past. Motorola did put a fingerprint sensor on the chin and also used it as a clever contraption to slide in a portion of the flexible screen, but it was still a divisive design.
In 2022, the chin is going away. A Lenovo executive had already showcased the phone on stage before its launch, revealing a design without any chin and symmetrical bezels at the top and bottom. Plus, there is no camera notch for the selfie camera at the top.
Motorola is also improving the folding design by making the teardrop-shaped hinge’s inner radius 3.3mm. It will allow the device to be in a half-open position or act as a tripod for your selfies. Motorola has teased several use cases like watching a video on the top half while chatting on the lower half, plus other multitasking stuff.
While the design makeover is clean, Motorola still retains some of the classic Razr design by making the top and bottom edges ever so slightly curved. The outer cover display, which is already noticeably bigger and significantly more functional than Samsung’s Galaxy Galaxy Z Flip 3, is also adding a few millimeters to itself on the Razr 2022.
The inner foldable panel is a 6.7-inch OLED screen, while the cover display is a 3-inch unit with an 800 x 573 resolution, which will get nine different widgets for at-a-glance info. The display will have support for DC dimming and a 10-bit panel with HDR10+ support. It will be one of the few smartphones in the market to sport an OLED display with a 144Hz refresh rate.
Another notable change is the dual-lens rear camera setup, but there is no word if more color options will be on the table this year aside from the usual black trim.
Processor
Motorola has confirmed that the Razr 2022 will come armed with Qualcomm’s top-tier Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset — making the Razr 2022 Motorola’s most technically capable foldable by a long shot.
While the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 might not offer a major performance leap over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, it is a huge jump for Motorola. So far, the Motorola Razr foldable phones have relied on midrange chips such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G, which makes the Motorola Razr 2022 a massive update for the lineup. It comes in three variants of 8GB of RAM paired with 128GB of storage, 8GB paired with 256GB, and 12GB with a whopping 512GB.
But there is more to the picture here than just the added raw performance. A flagship-grade chip also unlocks new capabilities for the camera and ensures that it stays at the top of the priority list when it comes to rolling out software updates in the long run.
Cameras
In addition to a weak chip, another chink in the Motorola Razr’s armor has been the camera output. Motorola has remained loyal to a single rear camera formula for all its foldable phones so far. And even though the 48-megapixel camera on the Razr 5G delivered solid results, it was just not enough for the original asking price of nearly $1,400 – both in terms of raw quality and lens versatility.
Thankfully, Motorola is making positive strides in that department as well. The Razr 2022 has a 1/1.55-inch 50MP primary camera with OIS. It supports 4-in-1 pixel binning, so you can expect to get 12.5MP images. The main camera is accompanied by a 13MP ultrawide camera with a 121-degree field of view and support for macro shooting. On the front, you get a 32MP sensor.
The overall camera setup might not be as powerful as the main snapper, but if phones like the iPhone 13, Galaxy S22, and Pixel 6 are anything to go by, those are enough pixels to deliver some impressive photos.
Battery
Battery life is often a struggle for folding smartphones — and this has been especially true for previous Razr foldables. Thankfully, the Razr 2022 is making some progress to address this. Prior to the phone’s full announcement, Motorola confirmed that the Razr 2022 would have a 3,500mAh battery capacity.
While that’s relatively small compared to non-folding phones, the small size of flipping smartphones means that batteries have always been smaller than the average. In addition, this is larger than the 3,300mAh battery in the Z Flip 3 (but not the 3,700mAh one in the newly announced Flip 4) and the 2,800mAh battery used in the Razr 5G. Combined with the improved power efficiency of the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, the Razr 2022 should be better in this department.
Price and availability
Coming to the pricing, Motorola is more aggressive this time around. The Razr 2022 has been announced in China to range from 6,000 Chinese Yuan for the cheapest model, with a 7, 300 Chinese Yuan asking price for the most expensive one. These translate to $890 to $1,083, though it’s never quite that straightforward. It would still be a drop from the $1,500 price of the previous generation and close enough to the Z Flip 4’s $1,000 price that the Razr could even undercut it.
So far, Motorola has only shared plans to launch the Razr 2022 in China, but the company often starts its mobile launches with a China launch before expanding to Europe and the U.S. We’ll hold out for an announcement later and update this if and went that happens.
