The Moto Razr Fold is Samsung’s wakeup call

Samsung may be dominating the foldable market, but has Motorola silently out-evolved the Galaxy Z Fold?

Yes, the Galaxy Z phones are supported by massive advertising budgets and can be seen everywhere. But now that the Razr Fold is out, you can see a very positive community reception. Some praise it as a “comeback”, but that did get me scratching my head a little bit.

Motorola has been pushing out solid foldables for a few years now. Granted, the Razr Fold is the first book-type foldable, the flip-form Razr models have been offering evolution while the Galaxy Z Flip was stuck in the past for a good while.

Razr-sharp cover screen

The Moto Razr revival in 2019 was pretty exciting. It had the old design of the iconic 2000s Razr phone, but with a bigger, foldable internal screen. However, Motorola quickly learned that wasn’t very practical.

The design was good nostalgia bait, but it looked clunky and wasn’t very good use of real estate for the 2020s. We just like bigger screens today!

So, the Razr dropped the old design, as iconic as it may be, and adopted one philosophy. Always be growing (the screens)!

In 2023, we got a Motorola Razr Fold with a cover screen so big, that it spread all the way around its main camera module. And it ran full Android — the UI would scale appropriately, and you could run pretty much any app you downloaded from the Play Store on it, provided its developer had updated it to follow Android’s new scaling rules.



That made the cover screen infinitely more useful than what the Galaxy Z Flip 5 from the same year gave us. It had a weirdly-shaped, smaller cover screen that only showed you widgets from specific Samsung apps. Yes, there was an API for developers to make their own cover screen widgets, but guess how many actually devoted the time and resources to do that.

“But, but, if you installed Samsung Good Lock and activated this one specific feature, you could use the Z Flip’s external screen to run the full Android experience”.

Yes, true. Couple of caveats — one, the screen was still small and awkward. Two, back then, Good Lock was geo-blocked in some countries, though it was available in the big markets like the USA, South Korea, India. Three, why not have it work like this out of the box?

Ultimately, Samsung caved and expanded the cover screen and its usability with the Galaxy Z Flip 7 (2025!), so I think we can agree that Motorola was on to something and Samsung wanted it.

The Razr Fold is a culmination of Motorola’s silent evolution

Motorola was thinking outside of the box even with the original Razr 2019 reboot. To combat the deep crease and avoid a fold crinkle forming over time, they introduced a pretty clever mechanism, which made that Razr a standout engineering marvel.

The big “chin” of the phone actually had movable steel plates, which held onto the plastic OLED display sheet. When you would go to fold the Razr (2019), the plates pushed the screen a bit deeper towards the hinge in the middle. Said hinge would also pull back to accommodate for the display sheet.

The result is that, instead of directly folding in half, the screen bends into a much softer teardrop loop shape in the middle. Which is why Razr phones have had a less aggressive crease for years now.



In 2023, the Razr Flip mechanism was redesigned to drop a lot of the moving parts and make it slimmer and lighter, and allow for IP52 rating.

So, when the Razr Fold entered development, it inherited all the improvements that Motorola did to the hinge over the years, and even comes with an impressive IP49 rating (protected against particles bigger than 1 mm, protected against high-pressure water jets).

Motorola’s textured design brings some fun to your phone

Again, for some years now, Motorola has been experimenting with these fun textures on its flagship smartphones. What started with luxurious faux leather has developed into multiple shells, with fabric-like or wood finishes that bring the premium line to a whole new level.

The Razr Fold doesn’t come in a plethora of new finishes, which is a shame. But both the white and black models have a unique texture to them that instantly elevates them above the pack.

Plus, they make the phones extra grippy, which is quite important on a foldable. These phones still can’t accommodate a “proper” protective case unless you can live with a ton of extra bulk and clunkiness.

Reality check and the looming threat of the Galaxy Z Fold 8

All that said, the Motorola Razr Fold is still fighting an uphill battle.

It’s a first-generation Motorola booklet foldable. The weary shopper might remember that, while the Razr pioneered the teardrop hinge, there are also many reports about it eventually cracking the screen down the middle.

Maybe Motorola improved it, but only enough time with these phones being out in the wild will give us the conclusive evidence.

The software is clean and snappy, but many might see it as being bare-bones. Especially now that AI features are the talk of the town, Motorola just didn’t invest much in that department.

Instead of focusing on something unique, they chose to pack up a suite of Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, and have “Moto AI” contextually bring them up depending on your situation.

If you want AI-assisted photo editing, you will rely on what’s inside Google Photos. If you want article summaries… well no, not yet.

Moto AI can summarize your notifications, record and summarize meetings, and tag and organize screenshots and photos if you enable “Remember This” mode. That’s about it.

The Galaxy Z Fold line isn’t just the marketing budget standing behind it. The phones are truly powerful with their overclocked Snapdragon chips, they have a massive portfolio of software features, including the DeX suite, which a lot of folks praise for at least giving you the option of laptop-ifying your phone.

But does it support a Pen?

One thing, Samsung had better bring S Pen support back with the Galaxy Z Fold 8. It officially had to omit it from the Z Fold 7 because of how thin the new design was.

However, since then, we’ve had thin foldables that do support one — the Honor Magic V6 with the Honor Magic-Pen, and yes, the Motorola Z Fold with the Moto Pen Ultra proved that it’s possible. If the Z Fold 8 plugs its eyes and ears and pretends these don’t exist, it may just start bleeding fan support towards the competition.

Are foldables peaking?

It’s been 7 years since the original Galaxy Fold launched, and it has been a wild ride. From a faulty botched launch at first, to a massive jump with the Galaxy Z Fold 2. Then, the competition joined in and we started getting things we didn’t expect to see for years — like water-resistance, massive batteries inside those tiny shells, and edge-to-edge screens on all sides.

Not to mention how cameras on foldables have evolved over that short period. Some purists will say that we are not there yet — a slab phone that’s dedicated to giving you the best camera experience will still beat a foldable every time. Sure. I wonder how long this is going to stay true for?

Right now, the Razr Fold is exceptionally decent at everything it does. It may not be the best in any particular field, but it’s a solid all rounder. And didn’t this what made the iPhone popular for so many years in the first place?

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