More appearance than intelligence

Review: Motorola Razr 50 Ultra - Style and Flair

Motorola Razr 50 Ultra puts the impression first.

Erik Mörner

Published 5 May 2024 - 05:05 Modified 24 January 2025 - 16:03

Motorola sees its foldable phones as flagships, but with a different target audience and profile than their other offerings. A lot has happened since the first foldable phone came out, and it is especially noticeable on the outside, where the external display has grown larger year by year and now allows you to run regular apps more or less fully, without opening the phone if you prefer. At the same time, the foldable phone is still a compromise and an expensive one, so despite the high price tag, you don't get everything here that you get in the best phones in a more traditional format.

The new Razr 50 Ultra is equipped with a 4-inch external screen with holes for both cameras. This is the top model in the Razr series and is powered by the Snapdragon 8S Gen 3, which is the same chip found in the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra. This means in practice that the phone lacks true flagship performance but combines performance sufficient for most use cases with generous battery life without the price of the phone skyrocketing too much. A reasonable compromise, then. The camera setup also signals a lower level of ambition, so Razr prioritizes form over function in several ways. Exactly how the cameras perform, we will return to.

Appearance over intelligence

Motorola focuses a lot on feeling and experience, and it shows in both material and color choices. My test unit is green with a back in vegan leather, which gives a soft and matte feel, so the phone doesn't become slippery. In the package, besides the charger, there is a leather strap so I can carry the phone around my neck or over my shoulder like a small handbag. It feels like the whole creation is made for you to show it off.

Both this phone and the slightly cheaper sister model Razr 50 have received a new, improved folding mechanism that takes up less space and is supposed to be more durable and reliable. Overall, the entire construction feels trustworthy, and it's possible to open the phone with one hand on the occasions you choose not to just use the outer screen.

On the outer screen, we notice that Motorola for the first time offers an active lock screen, so you can see an outline of important tasks like the clock, notifications, and more whenever the phone is in locked sleep mode. A real Always on Display, in other words. Motorola has previously lacked this. The outer screen functions, once you've activated it, as both a dashboard with quick information and tools to play music, check the weather, calendar, and so on in widgets, and as a more or less fully-fledged phone with apps. However, there are some exceptions, and manual adjustments are required for everything to work. One of the apps that has a shortcut from the start is the SMS app, which is good. I can easily see scenarios where I want to send a quick SMS, 'I'm on my way, there shortly,' but when I click the icon for the first time, the phone just says that I need to open the large screen to use the app. You can manage this yourself in the settings, so I go in there and manually allow the SMS app to run on the small screen. Then it works. At the same time, the screen size clearly makes some use cases unsuitable. Checking the weather, calendar, changing music, sending a short message works well. Taking a selfie is, of course, excellent since you have both the outer screen as a viewfinder and the professional outer cameras for the purpose at hand. However, browsing, reading longer texts than a sentence, and checking emails are still significantly easier to do on a screen larger than 4 inches, so it's much better to unfold the phone.

Then you should not overestimate the possibilities of an outer screen. The outer screen is easily accessible unlike the foldable one in this type of phone, but in a regular phone in a normal format, you have the large screen always easily accessible without the extra step of first having to unfold something.

Easy access to Spotify or Google's AI assistant, which Motorola easily highlights as advantages, are thus features that all Android phones share, whether foldable or not.

Motorola uses the foldable format for the camera app so that you can film with the phone half unfolded, and get a better camera grip, as well as set up the phone as its own tripod or get a special collage with series of images like in a traditional photo booth. When you take photos or videos, the outer screen can also be used to show the person you are photographing how the picture will turn out, or to display an animated figure that can be effective in capturing perhaps especially children's interest and eliciting a laugh.

Mid-range Cameras

When it comes to the cameras, the Razr 50 Ultra now has both a main camera and a 50-megapixel telephoto lens, so you get optical zoom but only with 2x magnification, which doesn't go very far. No camera features, therefore, that elevate the phone from mid-range, and the same applies to pictures in the dark. It lags far behind the best,

The color reproduction tends to lean towards the more saturated side with accentuated colors not always entirely true to reality. This is even in the mode called Natural, for there is also a mode that is supposed to provide 'automatic enhancement.'

When I take pictures during the test period, I also notice that the phone struggles with exposure in panoramic images, where often part of the image becomes heavily overexposed. If you're just after a good camera, you can get a phone with an equally good camera for about a third of the price that the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra costs.

Questions and Answers

How durable is it?

Motorola says that the folding mechanism has been redesigned to be more compact and reliable. The phone is protected according to IPX8. This means it can withstand water but is not guaranteed to keep out dust or other small particles.

How do I unlock the phone?

The fingerprint sensor is located in the small power button on the side, but you can also use a PIN code or facial recognition. With facial recognition, you can use either the outer camera if it's the small screen or the inner one if you've unfolded the phone when you want to unlock it.

Is the crease noticeable?

The first generation of foldable phones had a more pronounced wavy crease in the screen when unfolded, but even here and now, the crease is clearly visible and noticeable.