The first thing you need to do with a flip phone is what I call the flip check. Slide your thumb into the crevice and flip the top half of the phone out. Is it satisfying? Do you feel like you’re an action star in a movie taking a Very Important™ call? The new Motorola Razr+ gets close, though you do need some vigor when you flip, and the sound it makes is like cracking knuckles made of laminated paper. Yech.
Still, this folding phone is a massive improvement over the original Razr—er, not that original Razr, but the folding smartphone Motorola debuted in 2020. It looks cute, especially in the Viva Magenta color, and the external display is useful this time around. Best of all, this clamshell Android phone can fit in the smallest pockets.
The Flipper
Folding phones started out as the antidote to the boring, rectangular slabs smartphones have become. But now these flip-and-fold devices themselves look eerily similar. The new Motorola Razr+ sheds the iconic “chin” design and takes a page from Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip4 and Oppo’s Find N2 Flip. It looks cleaner and is more functional—the external display is the largest you’ll find on a flip smartphone—but the design closely resembles its peers. The saving grace is the ruby color (that’s hot) and the vegan leather back. It feels luxe and also keeps the phone from sliding around a desk.
Photograph: Motorola
The front 3.6-inch OLED screen is also what makes this flip special. It’s large enough to use some apps and read notifications clearly, and you can customize what panels you want to flip through (get it?) by scrolling left or right. These panels include an app tray, calendar, news, contacts, and weather. My favorite is the Games panel, which has titles like Marble Mayhem, where you need to physically rotate the phone to move a marble through a maze, and Astro Odyssey, an endless runner much like Google Chrome’s offline Dinosaur Game. It’s a fun and comfortable way to pass the time because you don’t need to hold a big-screen phone to play.
You can launch all your apps on this external screen and expand them to take up the whole space, but naturally, things are still cramped. I only found a few apps useful on this screen, like YouTube Music to choose another song, Google Home to control my smart home devices, and even Reddit and Twitter to kill time when I didn’t want to open the phone.
Most of the time I stuck to the external screen to keep an eye on the weather and my calendar, not to mention my notifications. I replied to a few messages here and there, but the keyboard takes up the whole screen and feels clunky to use. When you do open up the Razr+, you can seamlessly continue using those apps on the bigger screen. You can also choose what apps stay open on the small screen when you close it up.
The best part of the external display is when you use it with the camera. Twist the phone twice to launch the camera app and you can take high-quality selfies with the superior 12-megapixel primary camera instead of the 32-MP selfie camera on the inside. The screen acts as a viewfinder. Even better, when you unfold the Razr+ and launch the camera app, the person you’re photographing can see a preview of themselves on the exterior screen. Everyone I’ve photographed this way has loved being able to see exactly what they look like, instead of moping about how much they’re slouching after the fact.