Hello-again, Moto: Motorola Razr 5G Review

 If you were a kid growing up in the early 2000's, there is a very good chance you've heard of the Motorola Razr. Or hell, your parents; like mine, actually owned one! The Razr V3 was arguably the phone to get up until the introduction of the first iPhone. It's radical sleek, thin profile and slew of celebrity endorsements led to it being the best-selling feature phone to date, saving Motorola's cell phone division in the process. But alas; times have changed and the Razr V3 and feature phones in general have long since become nothing more than a memory in a world now dominated by smartphones. That still hasn't stopped Motorola from trying to recapitalize on the name of it's most successful product, none of which have really managed to recapture that same magic. The Razr 5G is arguably the most faithful of those attempts, but depending on who you are - it still may not be enough.

The Razr 5G came hot on the heels of Motorola's first folding Razr smartphone: the Razr 2019. It was... not a hit. While Motorola nailed the overall design, the phone was marred by bad performance across the board and significant build quality issues like the hinge squeaking as you open it. To make matters worse, the 2019 model was a $1500 smartphone when it was new, which is frankly insane given how middling it's specs were. Especially for a phone released in the dying days of 4G LTE's prominence.

Source: Motorola

The 2020 5G model sought to rectify this by improving the overall build quality of the device and giving it a generous spec bump. More RAM, more storage, a better camera, 5G connectivity, and a newer processor were all added in the hopes of making the Razr a worthy contender in the foldable space. The price though, wasn't much better at $1400. Just a $100 drop from it's predecessor. The core design was left mostly unchanged which let's be honest; that's probably the number one reason you'd have even considered stomaching that price tag anyways. 

Source: 9to5Google

Flipping this phone open for the first time was cathartic. That first push under the clamshell with the thumb to the slight wrist flick to help the spring assisted hinge open the phone up; it transported me right back to 2004 as I flipped open my mom's or dad's Razr V3 to play a laughable round of Java Golf. 

They absolutely nailed the aesthetic design of this phone with the same tapered edges, the symmetry of the camera and Moto logo on the back of the phone, all the way down to the big "chin" on the bottom. It screams Razr V3 and yet, despite drawing so heavily from it near two-decade old predecessor, it still looks and feels as cutting edge as ever, especially once you start marveling at how the folding P-OLED display works.

It's admittedly a bit nerve wracking seeing that display flex as you open and close the display for the first few times. But once you start using the phone, that whole aura of unease just kind of vanishes. It feels oddly normal to use in spite of it's totally radical design. The plastic display feels slick like glass under your fingers and although it's got a few humps where it bends in in the middle, it feels like any other smartphone screen. 

The display itself certainly isn't going to make headlines though. It's not of a particularly high resolution compared to other flagship priced phones nor does it have a buttery smooth refresh rate, but on a screen this size you're going to be hard pressed to notice either of those things anyways. The ultra-wide/tall aspect ratio plus the notch makes scaling things a little weird, but for the most part it works. I would not recommend trying to fullscreen apps in landscape that have controls along the extreme left or right side of the display, as they can get cut off by the notch and rounded edges.

The external display is another story entirely. It seems like a gimmick and honestly, it probably is - but you find a surprising number of uses for it once you actually start messing with it. Motorola let's you run any app on the external display, which sounds nuts but often times you'll find most apps seem to play ball on the tiny screen just fine. This opens up a whole slew of possibilities for taking advantage of the phone's remarkably small closed form factor.

Things like calculators, stopwatches, and messaging all work a treat on this little screen. Want to play Asphalt 9 or CoD Mobile on it? You're welcome to try. My personal favorite though, is being able to use the music player while I'm out on a run and not have to worry about fudging around with a giant-ass slab that could come flying out of my pocket at any moment. The handiness of the external display is also apparent when you recognize just how susceptible to particle intrusion the device seems when it's open (more on that later). The more you can keep it closed when you're doing messy things, the better.

That brings me to the performance of the Razr. A lot of sources dragged this phone through the mud on how "outdated" or "mid-tier" it's hardware specs were, even compared to it's predecessor. I decided to put this to the test with 3DMark's test suite on the Razr to see where it falls in the overall rankings. Here's a chart comparing these scores with the other phones I have in my possession, as well as the posted scores for Samsung's Z Flip series:

Needless to say, yeah... it's not good. The Razr was predictably blown away by the Note 20 Ultra and iPhone 14 Pro Max on the tests, but it's also handily bested by all three Z Flip generations. With the smallest storage options, all of those phones are cheaper than what Motorola was charging for the Razr at launch. To make matters worse, this thing can't even eclipse my old Galaxy Note 8 in the Sling Shot Unlimited test. So not only is the Razr's peak performance completely lacking against other flagship positioned devices released since 2020, it can't quite match a phone that was already three years old at the time of it's release. 

That said, dwelling on peak performance is a bit unrealistic in my opinion. Churning though demanding graphical applications is not what this, or really most phones being sold are going to do for most of their lifespan. I don't heavily game on my phone, and unless I'm stuck on a plane with a power outlet right in front of me, I spend most of my time making calls, texting, and doing the occasional web or video binge on it. In that regard the Razr feels totally unremarkable, and that's a good thing. Android 11 feels fast and responsive on the Razr and I had basically zero issues daily driving it over the past two months. It excels at the mundane, which for me is a bigger selling point than it being able to run console level graphics at 60 frames per second or whatever.

The cameras are also fine. I could stop at that, but since every major tech outlet seems to decry the camera performance of this phone as no less than an overflowing dumpster full of excrement, I'm going to step up to it's defense. Hot take: you CAN take nice looking pictures with the Razr 5G. No, they're not going to touch a DSLR in terms of quality or make an iPhone Pro photographer have cold sweats at night, but you can 'Gram all day with this thing and the photos aren't going to make somebody gouge their own eyeballs out. Especially not the ones from the 48 MP main sensor. See for yourself:

Granted, I'm not a good photographer. I know jack shit about how a camera works other than how to autofocus on something and press the shutter button, and usually; if I know I need to take good pictures of something with a zoom that actually works, I'm not reaching for my phone. All I can say is, the photos from the Razr are fairly sharp, capture detail well, and look generally nice. Sure, the graining isn't great, especially in less-than-ideal lighting, the 'shutter' response is a little slow, and the digital zoom performance is lousy but to be totally honest, I don't see how this camera could be considered downright bad by any stretch. I guess if you can't shoot like Ansel Adams straight out of the box then it's automatically considered crap these days.

Also, the phone smiles at people when it needs to get their attention for a photo. Isn't that cute?

Once you get past the novelty of the Razr's folding form factor and it's perfectly normal day-to-day usability, things start to get a little shaky. The most glaring issue many reviews have pointed out regarding this phone is the battery life. The phone has two batteries in each half of the clamshell which total up to a completely yawn inducing 2,800 mAh of total capacity. In my experience, this is just "good enough". It'll get you through a whole day provided you aren't doing extensive sessions of video watching, gaming, or GPS navigation but even then it's still pushing it. I could take my phone off the charger at 8:00AM, use it sparingly for most of day with the occasional call, text, or web session, and it'll be down to ~20% charge by the time I turn in for the night.

Expect to be doing this a lot.

For non-power users like myself, that's not a huge issue. The Razr offers a marginal improvement to what my Note 8's depleted battery at roughly 2,500 mAh was getting me, but in this day and age; I can't help but still feel underwhelmed. When you have phones packing over 4,000 mAh battery packs that can easily get you through an entire day of fairly extensive use, you can't help but feel like Motorola could've done more in this regard. I understand the phone's form factor limits it's ability to have a bigger battery, but even Samsung managed to cram a 3,300 mAh pack (and better cameras) into the similarly sized Z Flip 3. I wonder what Motorola's excuse is here.

I also found the Razr's onboard audio performance to be pretty mediocre. The phone uses a mono speaker like many smartphones do, but the unit in the Razr sounds like somebody screaming at you through a tin can. It's loud, but it sure as hell doesn't sound great, especially when compared to similarly priced flagship phones with stereo speakers. Let's also not gloss over the speaker's horrible placement right on the heel of the phone where it often gets covered by your hand in landscape mode, and that's not a sin Motorola is the only one still guilty of. 

Guys, c'mon. Why are we still doing this? We've had over a decade of smartphone development and the bottom of the phone is still the best place for the primary speaker? Give me a freakin' break. HTC's mobile division is probably turning over in it's grave right now. 

There's also no headphone jack, but at this point it's more of an occasional dumb inconvenience than an actual deal breaker.

The bad onboard sound is also compounded by the mediocre options for audio tuning. I know this is subjective, but the factory audio tuning sucks, and the handful of presets built into the phone also do little to improve the sound quality over Bluetooth or USB. There's no manual equalizer either, so you're forced to use these presets and most of them sound terrible. The "Home Theatre" setting is by far the richest sounding of the three presets, but I've found my best sound came from using the "Custom" mode with the EQ set to "Balanced" and the surround effect set to "Wide". I tuned my music library further using doubleTwist's manual EQ and now the Razr sounds pretty good across all my audio devices. Unfortunately, doubleTwist's EQ tuning doesn't extend across the entire device, but tweaking the factory presets do, and they helped immensely.

By far the most glaring fault I found though, is how delicate feeling the Razr is. That's not to say the phone isn't well built, but when I consider what compromises have been made to make the folding display work, I feel a justified need to baby this thing more than I have any other phone I've owned. There is a visible gap between the display and the body of the phone that becomes even wider at the hinge when you close the clamshell. It's entirely possible you could get crumbs and pieces of grit inside these gaps that could do a number on the complex hinge mechanism of the phone, and I don't even want to think about liquids. Reinforcing this is the phone's lack of an ingress protection (IP) rating. Like, it's not rated 'IP00' or some other terrible rating; it flat out doesn't have one. Motorola says the internals are coated in a water repellant material, but that's literally it.

This is just asking for trouble.

This is especially concerning to me because I use my phone in the shop and outside frequently. The nice thing about most modern slab phones is that; especially in a good case, they can take a beating and still work. I've dropped my cased Note 8 on concrete, soaked it, covered it in dust several times and it barely has a scratch on it. I don't even want to consider what kind of horrors such mistreatment would impart onto the Razr. I can't even set it on the table next to me while I have lunch, for fear one stupid errant crumb or drop of water is all it's going to take to send my precious phone straight to the junk drawer. Maybe I'm being a bit of a worrywart, but with tech this weird, I think it's better to err on the side of caution rather than try to roll the dice and use it like any other phone. 

Did I mention the phone is also quite slippery? Because it is. The slim profile and oodles of slick glass on the back make handling this thing even more of an exercise in caution. My advice: pop it in a case. 

Even with those shortcomings, I still really like the Razr 5G. It's throwback design is damn near perfect and it proved to be far more usable of a device than I was initially expecting. It feels great in the hands, it folds very compact, and above all; it's a totally functional, no frills smartphone experience that isn't hampered in any way by it's wacky, cutting-edge folding tech. I paid $400 for mine and I couldn't be more thrilled with how this turned out. But remember - this wasn't originally a $400 phone. 

Charging $1400 for this phone was an insane move by Motorola, and they clearly didn't learn their lesson with the prior generation Razr. When you look past the novelty and nostalgia, you're stuck with a phone that can't even outperform a years-old device - let alone the current crop of monster slabs in it's price bracket. Giant batteries, state-of-the-art cameras, gorgeous displays, and just sheer refinement are not something you're getting with the Razr.

While I strongly believe paying over $1000 for any smartphone is plain dumb, especially when you consider how poorly many "premium" devices are engineered from the standpoint of longevity and reducing e-waste, the Razr just doesn't do much to justify it's original price tag. It folds, but that's about it. It's one trick pony, and that poor horse got left in the dust by a field of thoroughbreds. To make matters worse for the Razr, Samsung's rival foldables offer bigger batteries and far better cameras, and in the case of the Z Flip 3 and newly released Z Flip 4; for less money. Hell, right now Motorola retails the Razr 5G for a deep discount at $799.99 and I still think that's way too expensive.

Clearly, Motorola has seen the writing on the wall, and the recently released Razr 2022 is trying to do a far better job at sticking it to Samsung. The new phone has better cameras, a larger 144Hz screen, a bigger 3,500 mAh battery, a significantly more powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC. But this phone has lost almost all of the retro charm that made the 2019 4G and 2020 5G Razrs so endearing despite their flaws. It just looks like a Z Flip copycat, and if it fails at that, then what's the point?

At the moment, the Razr (and to some extent, all foldables), still feel like an experiment you're paying for the privilege of being a part of, and I think most of the negative reception towards thing was in large part to that ridiculous original price tag. People just aren't totally comfortable with the idea of a foldable smartphone yet, and unless that device helps dampen the quirks by exceling in every aspect a phone in the premium price bracket should, it's never going to achieve mainstream success outside of a niche audience. The Razr 5G isn't that device. It's a perfectly serviceable phone that does it's one party trick damn well, but that just isn't enough to woo buyers away from the familiar comforts of a slab. As a budget phone though, and if you're curious about foldables and are willing to accept the shortcomings, I say try it. You might actually really like it.

What's Good

• Gorgeous, compact design that harkens back to the original Razr V3.
• Surprisingly nice feeling main display, and useful external display.
• Snappy day-to-day performance despite it's middling spec sheet.
• The cameras are far from cutting edge showstoppers, but they do their job.

What's Crap

• The battery life is just barely acceptable for a day of use at best.
• Tinny onboard mono speaker and lackluster built-in audio tuning options.
• Feels annoyingly delicate; dust and water protection is more-or-less non-existent.
• It's original $1399.99 MSRP is a complete joke considering what you get, especially from a hardware performance standpoint.

Verdict

If you're not overpaying for it and understand it's limitations, the Razr 5G is a great way to experience what a foldable smartphone has to offer, on top of being a lovely throwback.