Motorola Razr 2025 Review: It’s not an Ultra, but it’s great

If you’re looking to buy one of the best folding phones, there’s a strong chance that the Motorola Razr Ultra 2025 is on your list. It’s the best flip phone you can buy and the first time a company has made an Ultra, no-compromised version of a folding phone. The result is a phone that does it all, but with one key problem: its price.

Like its non-folding cousins, the Razr Ultra 2025 is not cheap. It starts at $1,300, and while it comes in gorgeous colors, it won’t be accessible to all customers. Motorola also has two other phones: the middle-of-the-pack Razr Plus and the base Razr 2025.

Both are refreshed versions of the previous generation, but while the Razr Plus has no noticeable changes, the Razr 2025 has a few tweaks that make it that much better. After spending a week with it — and having spent considerable time with the Ultra and previous Razrs — here’s why the Razr 2025 is the flip phone for most people.

Motorola Razr 2025 Specs

Motorola Razr 2025 Design & Display

If you’ve used any Razr for the past three years, the Razr 2025 will feel instantly familiar. Yet, if you’ve previously used a Plus, it will feel somewhat limiting thanks to the smaller front display.

Like last year’s Razr 2024, it’s designed to offer the quintessential Razr experience in a no-frills way. This means you get a smaller 3.5-inch Cover Display instead of the full-screen 4-inch one on the Razr Plus and Razr Ultra 2025. It has a peak brightness of 1,700 nits, which is lower than its siblings, and it also lacks Dolby Vision support, but it’s essentially the same high-quality display experience.

The size is the only downside, as the Cover Display works the same way as its siblings, and you also get the highly optimized experience that the Razr is known for. Yes, it has a lower refresh rate, but at 90Hz (versus 165Hz on the others), it’s not far below the best phones at 120Hz, and better than the 60Hz refresh rate on the Galaxy Z Flip 6.

Unfold the Razr 2025, and you get the same 6.9-inch display found on the Razr Plus, except it’s also limited to 120Hz. Once again, this is on par with the best phones. The peak brightness is 3000 nits, lower than its siblings but higher than the Galaxy Z Flip 6. The Razr 2025 may seem like a downgrade on paper, but it nonetheless offers a fantastic display experience.

The Razr 2025 measures 7.3mm thick when unfolded and 15.9mm when folded, but at 188 grams, it’s fairly light. The form factor is my favorite for daily usage, especially as the front display provides the ideal experience for regular daily use.

The Razr 2025 lacks the fancy leather and wood finishes of the Razr Ultra 2025 and instead features an eco leather finish made of a silicone polymer blend. The main display is a plastic OLED folding display, while Gorilla Glass Victus protects the Cover Display. The frame is made from aluminum, while the hinge is made from stainless steel.

Like its siblings, the Razr has IP48 dust and water protection, which makes it feel premium. Yes, the eco leather finish isn’t as plush, but it offers the same core experience at a much more affordable price. Even if you’ve never held a Razr, it still wows you like its siblings, especially in this unique light green Spring Bud color.

Motorola Razr 2025 Hardware & Performance

Motorola had to make some cuts to achieve a lower price, which is most noticeable in the underlying hardware and performance. If you’re used to the performance of the best phones powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite or Dimensity 9400, you’ll find the Razr 2025 somewhat lacking, but otherwise, it’ll be fast enough.

The Dimensity 7400X is not designed for the absolute best performance, but delivers for the most part. However, there is noticeable lag under heavy usage, including small stutters when gaming or quickly switching back and forth between tasks, which aren’t present in the Plus or Ultra models.

8GB of RAM and older UFS 2.2 storage also means it’s fairly slow at loading games or other resource-intensive tasks, but this only impacts the loading of most games, with actual gameplay being fairly smooth. The Dimensity 7400X is fast enough for low–and medium-resource games, but it doesn’t support Vulkan, so it won’t run the best AAA games.

Like the processor, the Razr 2025 features all the key hardware you need, but lacks the bells and whistles of its more-expensive siblings. There’s Wi-Fi 6 and 6e, but no Wi-Fi 7. There’s Bluetooth 5.4, but the choice of a MediaTek processor means there’s no aptX Lossless or aptX Adaptive codecs. There’s USB-C, but no USB On-The-Go.

However, these additional features are nice-to-have features for many people and not essential. Using the Razr 2025, the biggest surprise was not the missing features, but how little I missed them. I suspect that most people will ultimately feel the same way.

Motorola Razr 2025 Battery Life

The Razr 2025 features one key upgrade over last year’s base Razr 2024: a bigger battery. Unlike the Razr Plus 2025, which has the same 4,000 mAh battery as its predecessor, the Razr 2025 features a 4,500 mAh battery that’s 300 mAh larger than last year. It’s 200 mAh smaller than the Razr Ultra 2025 but has smaller displays and a less powerful processor.

The result? The best battery life I’ve experienced on a Razr. It’s on par with, if not better than, the Razr Ultra 2025.

Across the past few weeks, it has never drained to empty in a single day, with most charges lasting two full days of usage. Motorola doesn’t break out battery usage information like many phones, but my best guess is around 8 hours of screen usage across two days.

The front screen experience is so capable that it is split equally between the Cover and Main displays. If you use the front display more, this will likely extend the battery life even further. I used the Razr 2025 as a Wi-Fi hotspot on a 10-hour flight, and it drained the battery around 30%. The Razr 2025 has fantastic battery life and is exactly what you want from a folding phone.

The Razr 2025 features 30W wired charging and 15W wireless charging, and it takes around 75 minutes to charge it to full when plugged in. This is only 15 minutes slower than the Razr Ultra, despite the latter’s larger battery and considerably faster 68W charging. For context, the 25W charging on the Galaxy Z Flip 6 takes around 90 minutes, despite its smaller battery.

Motorola Razr 2025 Cameras

Motorola’s approach to cameras on the Razr lineup has always been somewhat confusing. The company has yet to adopt three cameras on a Razr—even the Ultra only has dual cameras—and the Razr lineup is the ultimate litmus test for which camera setup is best.

The Razr 2025 and Razr Plus 2025 feature a 50MP wide camera with an f/1.7 aperture, 25mm focal length, and dual-pixel phase detection autofocus (PDAF). They differ based on the secondary lens, with the Plus adopting a 50MP telephoto while the base 2025 features a 13MP ultrawide camera.

Like many of the best smartphone cameras, the main camera uses an in-sensor crop to offer a 2x “optical-quality” zoom. The camera can take great photos in good lighting, but it struggles in low light. The biggest challenge is the speed, as there’s a noticeable lag between pressing the shutter button and the camera responding, often resulting in a blurry or missed photo.

The 13MP ultrawide camera feels like an afterthought, but is particularly useful for group photos using the Cover Display when folded. Like the main camera, it can take great pictures in most lighting conditions. Still, the 120° field-of-view and location of the cameras in the bottom right corner mean you can sometimes inadvertently capture the edge of your palm in the frame.

The Razr’s form factor makes it perfect for capturing moments like a wedding or group trip, and this unique effect never wears off. I’ve been using the Razr to capture these moments for the past three years, and while the camera hasn’t been the best, although the Ultra goes a long way to changing this, the form factor makes it a worthwhile compromise.

You can easily launch the camera with a double twist of your wrist, and while the Razr 2025 is slower than the Ultra at doing so, you can still be ready to shoot within a couple of seconds. The base Razr 2025 doesn’t have the full camera prowess of the Razr Ultra 2025, but it is good enough for most people. It’s a mid-range camera that punches above its weight.

Motorola Razr 2025 Software

The double twist feature is just one of a few helpful Motorola features that make up its core approach to software. Dubbed Moto Actions, the other useful feature is the double-chop to launch the flashlight, which is extremely useful with the Razr’s form factor.

Motorola’s software is mostly the core experience as designed by Google, with a few helpful additions. That’s for the main display, and it’s a slick experience perfectly matched to the Cover Display experience. This is where Motorola truly shines, and if you’re buying a Razr, the front display will be at least one of the reasons why.

Motorola’s approach to the Cover Display on the Razr lineup is simple: treat it like a small phone. It contrasts with every other flip phone, which offers a more curated experience, which is key to its USP.

It’s organized into a series of panels, each dedicated to different use cases. There’s a calendar that makes it easy to see your upcoming schedule, a weather panel, and a communications panel where you can set up one-tap shortcuts across apps and their functions. Some examples include sending a text message, posting to Instagram stories, dialing a specific contact via a third-party app, or more.

Then there are apps and widgets. You can add up to three panels full of as many apps and shortcuts as you like and up to three panels of widgets from across the apps on your phone. You can customize your phone to do as much with the front screen as you want, which enhances the utility of the small cover display aspect.

The panel of games is one of my favorite Razr 2025 features. It’s full of bite-sized games from GameSnacks, a Google company. For the past year, I’ve been addicted to the Freekick Football finger game, while previously, it was also StackBounce. There are two key issues: these require an internet connection so that they won’t work on a flight, and you can’t add additional games, even though GameSnacks has a vast library.

Everything about the Razr 2025 Cover Display is heavily optimized. Motorola goes considerably further than the competition, and the results are clear: Motorola has the gold standard for a flip phone cover display.

Motorola Razr 2025 AI

Like every phone maker, Motorola has many AI features baked into the Razr 2025. Although the phone lacks the dedicated AI key of the Razr Ultra, it has most of the same features across the range.

The default AI assistant is Gemini, but the Razr 2025 is also focused on offering you a choice of providers. It’s the first phone to come preloaded with Perplexity, and you’ll get three months free of the Pro plan.

There’s also Microsoft CoPilot with Recall, which connects well to Motorola’s Smart Connect features. These are designed to make it easy to use your Windows laptop and Android phone seamlessly together. While hardware-agnostic, they are designed to work best with Lenovo laptops and Motorola mobile devices. You can seamlessly transfer files, run apps, and even recall specific content from another device.

Then there’s Moto AI, and the Razr 2025 brings the next generation of Motorola’s in-house AI features. It offers improved versions of the first-generation features, including Remember This to take a screenshot and add notes to it, Pay Attention to start an audio recording with transcription, and Catch Me Up to summarize recent personal notifications.

It pairs this with the main second-generation feature, Next Move, which is designed to predict, you guessed it, your Next Move. After recognizing what’s on your display, it suggests next steps such as adding an event to your email, creating images or stickers in Image Studio, or using Playlist Studio to generate a music playlist for a specific theme in Amazon Music. I find Pay Attention to be the most useful AI feature, and it works fairly well, albeit it is considerably slower than its siblings, as it processes all requests in the cloud.

Motorola Razr 2025 Price & Availability

The Razr 2025 costs $700 and comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. This starting price is the key proposition, especially as the Razr Plus 2025 costs $1000, and the Razr Ultra 2025 starts at $1,300.

It comes in three colors: Gibraltar Sea (blue eco-leather), Lightest Sky (white), Parfait Pink, and Spring Bud, the green eco-leather seen in most of these photos. The pink is quite subtle, but my favorite is the Spring Bud. It’s vibrant and shocking, and lives up to the wow factor of its siblings.

Motorola Razr 2025 Verdict

If you’ve been considering a shift to a folding phone and have been hesitant to hit the buy button, the Razr 2025 might be the phone to convince you. It’s a mid-range phone that punches considerably higher. It offers the premium experience you want from a folding phone without breaking the bank.

If you’re expecting the best folding phone, the Razr 2025 isn’t for you, but if you want the best bang for your buck foldable, look no further than the Razr 2025. It offers 80% of the experience at 55% of the price of the Ultra, and if you can look past its imperfections, it’s the best flip phone for most people.