Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 Review
The Motorola Razr Ultra is a great flip phone, but its price is raising eyebrows.
The Razr Ultra 2026 is the luxury model of the flip phone world | Image by PhoneArena
There is no doubt that the new Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 edition takes the crown as the most sophisticated and premium flip phone of the year. And almost absurdly, at the very same time, it's practically the same phone as last year's model, with almost no changes. Yet, it somehow now costs $200 more — it retails for a whopping $1,500.
After a few days with this phone, I appreciate its luxurious look and slight improvements, but I don't think you should buy one.
First, there is a long list of what Motorola has not changed this year: the processor remains the same as the last Razr Ultra, the charging speeds haven't moved and even the screen sizes are all the same. You still have the same 16GB of RAM on board, and that might be the big reason for the price hike with the ongoing RAM crisis.
So what does it have? Well, the Razr Ultra 2026 has a bigger battery, a new high-end camera sensor and some AI refinements. And some gorgeous colors and styles.
While US carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile heavily feature and discount the lower-tier Razr 2026 and Razr Plus 2026 models, they don't offer the premium Ultra version.
The best place to buy it is probably via Motorola's official website. They currently offer it with a $400 discount when you trade-in almost any phone, and you get two free gifts: Moto Buds 2 Plus and a 4-pack of Moto Tags. You can also find the Razr Ultra over at Amazon and in Best Buy.
Table of Contents:
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Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 Design and Display
Budget foldables have never looked better
Image by PhoneArena
If there is one thing the Razr Ultra 2026 has going for it, it's the looks. Our review unit is the Orient Blue color, with a soft-touch alcantara finish that feels oh-so-nice to the touch. The other colorway, Cocoa, features a wood finish, which is also a welcome change from all the glass and metal slabs out there.
At 199 grams of weight, it's also a tiny bit heavier than the Galaxy Flip.
Just like all other new Razrs, it comes with IP48 water and dust resistance, but the 4 number means it's only protected from particles larger than 1mm. This means finer dust and sand may still find their way inside the hinge and potentially damage it, so be mindful.
Image by PhoneArena
Inside the box, you will find:
- Motorola Razr Ultra itself
- USB Type-C cable
- SIM ejector tool
- User manual
You get a 7-inch main OLED screen with 165Hz support (useful for gamers), and a 1224p resolution, so slightly crisper than your typical 1080p displays.
The external screen is a 4" OLED one, going edge to edge and flowing over the two cameras. It also supports 165Hz refresh rate for some reason, even though I don't imagine anyone would game on it and this makes no sense for daily use.
Display Measurements:
Motorola claims the screen can get slightly brighter this year, but in our in-house display measurements, we don't see that as the number is more or less on par with the previous edition. Motorola is known to make bold claims about brightness numbers, but those are usually measured in a way that's not realistic (imagine only measuring a very tiny white spot on an all-black screen), so we don't think most people would notice this change.
The fingerprint scanner is right in the power button on the side. It's a regular fingerprint scanner, and it's fast and reliable, I've had no issues with it.
Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 Camera
New main camera sensor
Image by PhoneArena
The Razr Ultra comes with two 50MP cameras, a main and an ultra-wide one.
The big change this year is a new cutting-edge type of sensor called LOFIC, or Lateral Overflow Integration Capacitor. This should give photos better dynamic range, meaning the brightest part of your photo won't get blown out to pure white, and shadows will have more detail too.
Main Camera
The LOFIC sensor sounds cool on paper, but in the pictures I took with both the Razr Ultra 2026 and 2025 models, I did not see a major improvement. Sure, color science is tweaked a bit and photos on the 2026 edition look brighter and more cheerful, but the difference is nothing major.
Portrait Mode
You can shoot 1x and 2x portrait mode photos on the Razr Ultra, but again, the quality has not changed much except for the slightly different color science.
Zoom Quality
While I didn't see a huge improvement in 1x photos, I was surprised to see a lot more detail in zoomed shots where the Razr Ultra 2026 wins it.
Ultra-wide
There are no major changes in the quality of the ultra-wide photos.
Selfies
I prefer the look of selfies from the new Ultra as it better illuminates the subject, which is ultimately what matters most in selfies.
Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 Performance & Benchmarks
Same old
Image by PhoneArena
You expect the latest processor in a $1,500 phone, but alas, the Razr Ultra features the yesteryear Snapdragon 8 Elite, the same chip that powered the 2025 edition of the phone. You can blame it on the economy, but it's not a good look.
At least, the phone keeps its generous 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.
CPU Performance Benchmarks:
Geekbench 6: A high single-core score is what makes your phone feel snappy during everyday tasks like opening apps, typing and browsing. The multi-core score matters most when doing heavier work like video editing or gaming.
Unsurprisingly, nothing has changed in the CPU performance this year.
GPU Performance
Wild Life Extreme is a heavy graphics workload used to measure a device's sustained GPU performance and thermal throttling. It uses older mobile rendering techniques and is friendly to older or lower-end mobile devices.
Sadly, you won't see the Razr Ultra in our GPU and gaming benchmarks. The new model got way too hot after 5-6 minutes of running the benchmark and just quit it. We tried this a couple of times with different graphics benhcmarks and got the same results. This is definitely concerning if you are planning to buy this phone for heavy-duty gaming.
Steel Nomad Light Stress Test: Measures your phone’s "gaming stamina" by comparing its peak speed (High) against its throttled speed after it heats up (Low), revealing whether your performance will stay smooth or start lagging during a long session.
Storage speed
Let's take a look at how fast that 512GB of on-board storage really is.
Storage tests measure how quickly your phone can move data. Random read and write show how fast your phone can find and move thousands of tiny, scattered files. This is the most important metric for an average user because it’s what happens when you open an app, check your notifications, or search through your photo gallery. Sequential read and write measure the speed of moving one giant, continuous file. You’ll notice this when you are saving a 4K video you just recorded or downloading a massive game update.
Interestingly, we are getting slightly higher random speeds, which determine daily performance, which is a nice small win.
Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 Software
I was also disappointed to learn that despite its sky-high $1,500 price, users are still getting only three years of OS updates with the Razr Ultra 2026. Compare that to seven years on the much cheaper Galaxy Flip 7, and this is not a good look for Motorola.
Otherwise, though, the software is your familiar clean take on Android (the phone ships with Android 16).
On the AI side, the Razr Ultra is the only one in the lineup with a dedicated button for it.
There are some incremental additions in the AI features:
- Catch Me Up: Summarizes missed notifications and chat threads from apps like WhatsApp and Messages. It's a little faster now and supports more regional languages on-device.
- Pay Attention: Records and transcribes live conversations or meetings, then drops a summary straight into Moto Notes. Multi-speaker separation has gotten better.
- Remember This: Attaches an AI-generated text description to any screenshot or photo you take, so you can find it later just by searching in plain language.
- Look and Talk: Wake the assistant by simply looking at the cover display when the phone is in Tent mode.
- Playlist / Image Studio: Generate wallpapers from a text description, or put a musical mood into words and get a custom playlist built around it.
Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 Battery
Unimpressive battery life
In my experience, the Razr Ultra is still mostly a one-day phone, but it does manage to last a bit longer and if you are on vacation and take lots of photos, it has a higher chance of making it to the end of the day.
PhoneArena Battery Test Results:
On our in-house battery tests, we got some very strange results from the Razr Ultra 2026 that we will have to investigate. It seems that recent Motorola phones drain surprisingly fast on our web browsing test, which puts the Razr Ultra at a disadvantage.
At the same time, it crushed the charts with nearly 10 hours of video playback, great for a flip phone.
In terms of charging, the phone supports 68W wired speeds, great for a flip, but keep in mind that Motorola uses its proprietary TurboPower system, so you need a Motorola charger. If you charge this with just your standard USB-C PD charger the likes of Anker, you will fall back to slower speeds.
Wireless charging is also supported at 30W, but no Qi2 and no magnets on board.
Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 Audio Quality and Haptics
With standard hybrid speakers (the main down-firing one at the bottom and a front firing one embedded in the earpiece), the Razr Ultra sounds quite good, but not outstanding given the limitations of the flip form factor.
The haptics are strong and tight, with a nice click to them.
Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 Specs
Here is an overview of the Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 specs:
|
|
|
| Motorola Razr Ultra (2026) | Motorola Razr Plus (2026) | Motorola Razr (2026) |
| Dimensions | ||
|---|---|---|
| 171.48 × 73.99 × 7.19 | 171.4 x 74 x 7.1 mm | 171.30 x 73.99 x 7.25 mm |
| Weight | ||
| 199.0 g | 189.0 g | 188.0 g |
| Size | ||
|---|---|---|
| 7.0-inch | 6.9-inch | 6.9-inch |
| Type | ||
| AMOLED, 165Hz | AMOLED, 165Hz | AMOLED, 120Hz |
| System chip | ||
|---|---|---|
| Snapdragon 8 Elite SM8750-AC (3 nm) | Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 SM8635 (4 nm) | MediaTek Dimensity 7450X (4 nm) |
| Memory | ||
| 16GB (LPDDR5X)/512GB (UFS 4.0) | 12GB (LPDDR5X)/256GB (UFS 4.0) | 8GB (LPDDR5X)/256GB (UFS 3.1) |
| OS | ||
| Android (16) | Android (16) | Android (16) |
| Type | ||
|---|---|---|
| 5000 mAh | 4500 mAh | 4800 mAh |
| Charge speed | ||
| Wired: 68.0W Wireless: 30.0W |
Wired: 45.0W Wireless: 15.0W | Wired: 30.0W Wireless: 15.0W |
| Main camera | ||
|---|---|---|
| 50 MP (OIS, PDAF) Aperture size: F1.8 Focal length: 24 mm Sensor size: 1/1.56" Pixel size: 1.0 μm |
50 MP (OIS, PDAF) Aperture size: F1.8 Focal length: 24 mm Sensor size: 1/1.95" Pixel size: 0.8 μm | 50 MP (PDAF) Aperture size: F1.7 Focal length: 25 mm Sensor size: 1/1.95" Pixel size: 0.8 μm |
| Second camera | ||
| 50 MP (Ultra-wide, PDAF) Aperture size: F2.0 Focal Length: 12 mm Sensor size: 1/2.93" Pixel size: 0.6 μm |
50 MP (Ultra-wide) Aperture size: F2.0 Focal Length: 12 mm Sensor size: 1/2.76" Pixel size: 0.64 μm | 50 MP (Ultra-wide) Aperture size: F2.0 Focal Length: 12 mm Sensor size: 1/2.76" Pixel size: 0.64 μm |
| Front | ||
| 50 MP | 32 MP | 32 MP |
See the full
Motorola Razr Ultra (2026) vs Motorola Razr Plus (2026) vs Motorola Razr (2026) specs comparison
or compare them to other phones using our
Phone Comparison tool
Should you buy it?
New phone | Image by PhoneArena
$1,500 is a lot of money for a phone that hasn't changed much from its previous generation, so the Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 doesn't make much sense at its full retail price. But it is going to get discounted. Just recently, we saw the Razr Ultra 2025 plunge to just $800 (the starting price of that model was $1,300), so it's reasonable to expect big discounts coming for this phone in the coming months.
Fortunately for Motorola (and sad for consumers), Samsung is also not expected to make big changes to its Flip lineup this year, but I would still wait to see what the Flip 8 brings. From there on, your best bet is hunting for the best bargain if you want a top-tier flip phone in 2026.
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