Motorola Razr 2022 review: Fastest flip in the west

Flip phones are having something of a renaissance thanks to folding display technology, but none of the recent entries has as much history at its back as the Motorola Razr 2022. The iconic Razr aesthetic may be gone but the Razr 2022 still has a lot going for it, with a vibrant display, a subtle hinge crease and a powerful processor.

There are some hiccups – support for future Android versions, especially, falls behind other flagships – but mostly it’s a success. The big question is how it stacks up against its key rivals in the folding flip phone space.

Motorola Razr 2022 review: What you need to know

It’s been a couple of years since Motorola’s last flip phone was released, and a few things have changed in the interim. For starters, the Razr’s protruding “chin” has been dropped, bringing the Razr 2022 more in line with recent competitors such as the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4.

The inner screen folds out to a larger 6.8in AMOLED panel as a result (versus 6.2in) and both the resolution and refresh rate are higher as well, at 1,080 x 2,400 and 144Hz respectively. The external display is a 2.7in AMOLED panel, just like before, although the resolution of this, at 573 x 800, is a little lower than its predecessor’s.

Inside is a faster Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset, backed up by 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The battery is now a higher-capacity 3,500mAh unit, and you’ll also find a 30W fast charger in the box. On the rear is a dual-camera setup, featuring a 50MP (f/1.8) main lens and a 13MP (f/2.2) ultrawide sensor, while the 32MP (f/2.4) interior selfie camera is set beneath the display.

Motorola Razr 2022 review: Price and competition

The Motorola Razr 2022 retails for £950, which puts it roughly in line with other recent flip phones. The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 starts at £999 but that’s for the 128GB model. If you want 256GB of onboard storage, like the Razr 2022, you’re looking at £1,059, and you can also opt for a 512GB version for £1,119. If you can push the budget a bit further, the Z Flip 4 offers terrific battery life and performance, as well as a solid set of cameras.

You might, however, want to set your sights on the recently released Oppo Find N2 Flip instead. This is a phone that has shaken the market up somewhat by coming in a fair bit cheaper than either the Motorola or Samsung options. For just £849, you get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, like the Razr 2022, a larger portrait cover screen and a barely noticeable hinge crease. The downsides are that the battery life is fairly weak and there’s room for improvement with the performance.

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Motorola Razr 2022 review: Design and key features

The first thing you’ll notice is the angular profile and that famous Razr chin have both been dropped. Instead, what you have is a simpler design, similar to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 – it’s essentially a regular smartphone that hinges in the middle and folds in two.

The bumpers around the display are a little chunkier than those on the Z Flip 4 and the Find N2 Flip, but otherwise the design is elegant enough. When folded, the back has a frosted finish, similar to the Motorola Edge 30 Ultra, with a glossy finish on the front – both Gorilla Glass 5. The volume keys and power button/fingerprint reader are on the right side, with the USB-C port and SIM tray on the bottom edge.

Despite weighing a fairly light 200g, the phone feels nice and sturdy, with the aluminium frame connecting to a stainless steel hinge. The phone is also rated at IP52 for weatherproofing, which means that it can’t be fully submerged like the IPX8-rated Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, but does offer better dust resistance and is splash proof. Either way, it’s superior to the Find N2 Flip, which doesn’t have an official IP rating at all.

Software is something of a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, I like Motorola’s clean, generally unfussy implementation of Android. However, there’s a bit more bloatware than I’d like, it only ships with Android 12 and Motorola says it will only receive two major software updates in its lifetime, meaning it will top out at Android 14. Compare this with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, which will be supported up to Android 16, or the Oppo Find N2 Flip, which will go all the way to Android 17, and it isn’t the best look for Motorola.

Motorola Razr 2022 review: Displays

The interior display on the Motorola Razr 2022 is a 6.7in AMOLED panel with a 1,080 x 2,400 resolution and a super-slick 144Hz refresh rate. Crucially, the crease at the hinge is barely visible: with the screen off, you can just about see a slight bump, but with the screen on, it’s all but invisible.

As an AMOLED panel, the display’s contrast is essentially perfect, but it’s also impressively bright. With adaptive brightness enabled and a torch shining on the ambient light sensor, I measured it peaking at 1,017cd/m² and, when displaying HDR content, the results were equally excellent, with the brightness rising even higher to 1,162cd/m².

There are two colour modes to choose in the phone’s settings: “Saturated” is the best mode for streaming, while “Natural” delivers more accurate colours for browsing the web. That being said, even on the Natural setting, the Razr 2022 still only managed an average Delta E colour variance score of 2.11 versus sRGB, which is some way off what we’d like to see at this price. Colour reproduction at least scored well, with an sRGB gamut coverage of 96% and a total gamut volume of 98.2% in the DisplayCal application.

The external AMOLED display measures 2.7in across the diagonal and has a resolution of 800 x 573 and a 60Hz refresh rate. It stretches horizontally across the phone, with the dual camera array and LED flash tucked in beneath it. In terms of functions, it can be used to frame selfies with the higher-resolution rear cameras, read and reply to messages, play games and watch YouTube videos.

Motorola Razr 2022 review: Performance and battery life

The Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 processor is the current darling of the flip phone game, appearing in both the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 and Oppo Find N2 Flip, so it’s no surprise that the Razr 2022 uses it as well.

It’s an octa-core chipset, running at up to 3.19GHz, and is paired here with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. As you can see in the chart below, it’s put to great use. The Razr 2022 comfortably trounces the Oppo Find N2 Flip in Geekbench 5, while also pulling around 6% ahead of the Z Flip 4 in the multicore part of the benchmark. Although it can’t match the Samsung Galaxy S23, which uses the newer Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the Razr 2022 is the fastest flip phone we’ve tested.

Gaming performance showed similarly impressive results, with the Razr 2022 hitting 121fps in the onscreen GFXBench tests and 239fps in the offscreen portion. Between the powerful hardware and the vibrant 144Hz display, the Motorola Razr 2022 is a terrific choice for mobile gaming.

The 3,500mAh battery is small by modern standards, but the Razr 2022 clearly excels in power efficiency, as it lasted for over 18 hours in our video test. This is still a few hours behind the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, but it’s a respectable result for a flip phone.

Once depleted, the battery can be juiced back up via the bundled 30W charger. While not as speedy as the Find N2 Flip’s 44W charger, this still performed well enough in testing, topping up the battery from empty to 50% in 16 minutes, and to full in around 45 minutes.

Motorola Razr 2022 review: Cameras

Where most modern flagships come with a triple rear camera system, flip phones tend to stick with just the two, and the Razr 2022 is no exception. Here, you have a single main wide-angle camera module at 50MP (f/1.8) and a 13MP (f/2.2) unit that handles ultrawide and macro photography.

Images captured on the main lens are captured at 12.5MP as standard, with pixel-binning combining four pixels into one, but you can choose to shoot in full 50MP resolution if you prefer. Whichever you opt for, images are crisp and vibrant, with rich colours and punchy contrast. The 50MP mode delivers images with the most detail but the pixel-binned shots do a decent job as well; in the shot below, for example, there’s plenty of detail captured in the finer areas of the tree branches.

Ultrawide cameras tend to rinse the colour and detail out of a shot, but the Razr’s is among the better examples I’ve tested. The below shot of the same scene doesn’t look quite as bright as with the main camera, and the branches do blur together slightly in places, but overall the image is still well lit and has plenty of depth.

Despite the lack of a dedicated lens, macro images are fairly impressive – taking a photo from around 4cm away captures the subject in terrific focus, with enough detail to make out the fine spines along the stem of the daisy. It’s not a mind-blowing inclusion but it performs well enough to prove that Motorola didn’t need to waste resources on cramming in a superfluous extra lens.

There is a night mode for low-light conditions but it’s the weakest of the settings. The image below, for instance, is brightened somewhat, but the whole scene is painted in a yellowish hue, and there’s tons of noise visible in the sky.

Selfie cameras can feel a little unnecessary on flip phones as you can take higher-quality snaps with the phone folded, but the 32MP lens used here is decent enough. The portrait mode struggled a little with fine hair but otherwise it performed well in testing.

Video recording has been upgraded since the last Razr, now offering 8K at 30fps, 4K at up to 60fps, 1080p at up to 120fps and a slow-motion setting that shoots up to 960fps. Optical image stablisation (OIS) features on the Razr too, with all video modes but the 8K benefitting from its inclusion. And of course, folding the phone allows you to use all of these functions front-facing as well.

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Motorola Razr 2022 review: Verdict

We’re still in the relative infancy of the folding phone craze but they’ve already come a long way, and the Razr 2022 is one of the best out there. The display is bright and vibrant, has a near-invisible hinge crease, and performance is as good as on any flip phone we’ve seen so far. Add to this improved stamina and a robust camera offering, and the Razr 2022 is an impressive all-round package.

So is it the best flip phone you can buy right now? Honestly, if it weren’t for the miserly policy on future Android updates, this would be a much closer call, but a slight edge in performance isn’t enough to dethrone the all-round quality of Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4. The Razr 2022 is undoubtedly Motorola’s best flip phone yet; it’s just not quite the best on the market.