Hands-On: Motorola's New Trio Of Razr Phones Are Beautiful, If Familiar Vessels For AI [Gallery]

Motorola just launched the Razr 2025 series, and they remain gorgeous and steadily improving foldables. But more than ever, this latest batch just feels like a collection of vessels for AI.

Unlike the past couple of years, Motorola has just announced a trio of new Razr foldables this year. The base Motorola Razr (2025), the Razr+ (2025), and the new high-end Razr Ultra. And, at first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking they look pretty familiar.

Outside of the big upgrades on the Razr Ultra – better cameras, Snapdragon 8 Elite, much faster charging, a dramatically bigger battery, and more – these devices look pretty much identical to the prior generation. That’s not a bad thing, though. Motorola’s 2024 Razr lineup was full of welcome upgrades such as the full-size 4-inch outer display on the Razr+ and more. This time around, the design is staying the same. The base model still has a smaller outer display, and both the Plus and Ultra models have those larger displays. Changes are mostly under the hood, but they’re also hidden in the hardware itself.

Motorola focused in on an updated, “stronger” hinge. While I’m not sure hinge strength has been much of a problem for foldables, the updated hinge does feel much smoother and has a nice spring to it that prior models did not. I’m not sure how it will age – the newly added dust resistance in the IP48 rating ought to help – but this might be the best foldable hinge I’ve tried on a device in the States, certainly for a flip phone at the very least. It feels very much like Oppo’s Find N Flip hinges.

The biggest thing I appreciated walking away from my time with the new Razr family is the attention Motorola has placed on the fit and finish of these devices. The new colors are vibrant and fun, and there’s so much variety in the texture. The wood grain “Mountain Trail” Razr Ultra is certainly going to be a favorite, but I personally really like the simple grip and texture of the “Spring Bud” base Razr and the “Cabaret” Razr Ultra as well. The Ultra’s brushed metal frame is a welcome change of pace from the “premium phones get a glossy finish” trend too. The only variant I wasn’t a big fan of was the Alcantara-backed version of the Razr Ultra, which feels like it won’t age well at all. That said, I’m glad to see Motorola trying something that, at least in smartphones, no one else has tried.

But it’s also a hard pill to swallow in a way. Motorola is putting so much effort into designing these phones, clearly, but the launch event I attended and much of the marketing around these devices is focused in on “Moto AI,” a suite of features that, frankly, I’m not all that impressed by. Motorola is making its own version of some good ideas already on the market, but notification summaries and “memory” features don’t quite feel worth their own button on the hardware of the Ultra. I’ll be curious to spend more time with these in the coming weeks, as I couldn’t use the features much today as, firstly, these features need time and your data to become useful and, secondly, most of the demo devices I was using weren’t signed into these accounts.

Motorola is truly going all in on working with others for the sake of AI, though. Gemini is still baked in and works on the cover display, but the company has also teamed up with Perplexity to pre-install the “answer engine” on each new Razr, plus Motorola works with Meta AI to power parts of Moto AI.