Another year, and Motorola is giving us another entry in its foldable Razr lineup. And considering the new phones’ branding as lifestyle products, it makes sense that Motorola hosted a preview event showing off the 2026 Razr, Razr Plus, and Razr Ultra at a villa in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, California.
This new Razr lineup — aside from some fantastic new shades and pops of color — will look largely familiar to existing fans of the series. The Razr Ultra is still the premium flagship, with the Razr Plus trickling down some of those high-end features as the mid-range option, and the Razr being the entry-level flagship.
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The phone’s display is still as bright as before, providing crisp, rich views that can battle direct sunlight on a clear day in California. And arguably the biggest appeal of any Razr, especially the display on the Ultra, is that almost any application can be used from the front without flipping the display open. You can set dedicated pages for apps — think Calendar or Weather — but you can also open almost any app of your choosing.
New with this generation is what Motorola is dubbing Live Tile, where statuses from applications like Lyft (think a rideshare vehicle approaching), sports scores, or a delivery status can appear at the top. It’s very similar to a Live Activity on an iPhone, and it’s a welcome addition here.
The new Razr Ultra, as well as the new Razr Plus and Razr, also now support video wallpapers that can spring to action when you lift the phone up. I’d like to give this feature a go with a video of my dog Rosie, but it works with any video at least five seconds in length and shot with a bokeh effect. It’s not a groundbreaking addition, but it’s nice to see more software features arrive year over year.
Of course, you can flip open the Razr Ultra 2026 to unveil the full-sized 7-inch Extreme AMOLED, set in a 22:9 aspect ratio, and it opens smoothly. Under the hood, there’s still that titanium hinge, which was introduced last year, and the phone, like its siblings in the lineup, still meets the IP48 standard for durability (note, though, that that’s for water protection, not dust).
From the quick demo I was shown, the Razr Ultra 2026 offered punchy, vibrant colors for more mundane tasks but also for watching videos on YouTube. In terms of the viewing experience, not much has changed year over year, but the phone’s display can now reach a peak brightness of 5,000 nits, and it still supports Dolby Vision. And, similar to the colors the Razr Ultra comes in, the screen is Pantone-validated for color.
Powering everything is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform, with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage as standard. Swiping and scrolling with the Razr Ultra felt plenty snappy in my hands-on time, and I suspect you’ll notice the biggest difference between the Ultra and the standard Razr and Razr Plus when gaming, given that those two phones use a MediaTek Dimensity 74350X and Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, respectively.
The Razr Ultra’s Snapdragon 8 Elite brain should also help it stay fresh compared to other smartphones, including the Galaxy Z Flip 7, which uses Samsung‘s own Exynos 2500 chipset.
The phone also runs Android 16 out of the box, with some Motorola customizations thrown in for good measure, and it’ll boast some new Google features, too — including one that debuts on the Razr Ultra but will be rolled out elsewhere soon.
I’m talking about Google’s new Wardrobe feature, which will collate and identify clothing items in your closet based on photos and let you pull out individual items — be it a button-down, a pair of shoes, or a pair of pants you love — to combine them together and see how they look on an avatar it creates for you.
This tool uses Google’s Nano Banana AI model, takes a few seconds to generate, and will launch in the coming months. It’ll arrive first on Android and eventually roll out to Google Photos on iOS, but it seems like a potentially very helpful tool with plenty of functionality. It can make picking an outfit, especially if you want to mix things up, a little easier.
You’ll also find Moto AI on the Razr Ultra 2026, which has a bunch of its own features, as well as third-party apps like Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. Of course, you can use these or ignore them.
The other change — and it’s a bigger one for the US market — is that Motorola is making the swap to silicon-carbon batteries. The tech giant says this will allow for longer-lasting runtimes and faster charging, and we’ve seen those results with other smartphones that have launched internationally (like the OnePlus 15 and Oppo Find X9 Ultra).
The result with the Razr Ultra is a 5,000mAh battery and a (quite frankly wild) maximum charging rate of 68W (wired). That means you’ll be able to refill the device in record time (for a flip foldable).
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Onto cameras, and there are still two cut-out holes on the phone’s front external display in the bottom-right corner, containing the 50MP main camera and a 50MP ultra-wide camera that doubles as a macro lens.
The main lens is now an LOFIC lens, which Motorola says delivers up to a 6x improvement in dynamic range, and which should translate to more clarity in darker shots and better highlights. It’s a claim we’ll need to put to the test formally, but the Razr Ultra was quick to snap shots back-to-back in my hands-on time, and the results looked promising. There’s also a 50MP selfie camera, which sits in a pinhole cut-out at the top of the main display.
Maybe the best part of the Razr Ultra, though, is the colors it’s available in. It’s an admittedly limited pool, but one great style is returning — or rather, staying in the lineup. I’m talking about Pantone Cocoa, which presents itself as a light brown wood. It’s certainly unique and reminds me of the Moto X, which also had the option of coming with a wood back.
Motorola calls the other shade blue, but it’s a bit more of a “burple” (blue + purple), and its formal name is Pantone Orient Blue. It’s still a soft-to-the-touch Alcantara, a material found on select Surface devices and premium vehicles — it’s really nice.
On paper and from my brief hands-on time, then, I think it’s clear that Motorola is making some nice changes while iterating on a design that already works for a smart flip phone with the Razr Ultra 2026.
There is one downside, though. The phone’s price is inflated — the Razr Ultra 2026 will start at $1,499 US, which marks a $200 increase on the Razr Ultra 2025. We’re awaiting confirmation of its pricing in the US and Australia, where the device will be dubbed the Motorola Razr 70 Ultra.
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The entry-level Razr is still the most affordable of the bunch, with a starting price of $799.99 and no generation-over-generation price increase, while the Razr Plus starts at $1,099.99, which marks a $99 increase in the States. Again, we’re waiting on price information for the UK and Australia for both phones.
Interestingly enough, the Razr Plus also benefits from a lot of the Ultra’s great features — it gets the 4-inch Extreme AMOLED external display with a slightly less durable Corning Gorilla Glass 3 coating, and opens up to a 6.9-inch AMOLED screen that tops out at 3,000 nits. It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip with 12GB of RAM, has a 4,500mAh silicon-carbon battery under the hood, and features a 50MP main camera as well as a 50MP ultra-wide camera on the front. Weirdly, though, it only ships in one color, which might be Motorola predicting its popularity (or lack thereof) or realizing it’s pretty close to the Ultra and a good bit more expensive than the standard Razr. It’s a nice shade of darker green dubbed Pantone Forest Green.
The entry-level Razr arguably packs the best color choices; they’re definitely the most fun. There’s the sparkling Pantone Bright White, which is a really joyous shade, but the standard model also comes in Pantone Hematite — basically a gray — Pantone Violet Ice, and Pantone Sporting Green. All of these colors are a bit more vibrant than their Ultra counterparts; Motorola definitely has the lifestyle-conscious in mind with its base Razr.
Maybe most importantly, the phone boasts fun features like the ability to rotate your wrist to open the camera or turn your hand left or right to zoom in while recording video. It’s those little touches that breathe some much-needed enthusiasm into phones like this.
As mentioned, the base Razr does have a less powerful processor than its siblings — it’s a MediaTek Dimensity 7450X brain paired with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage — but it will likely still provide the foundations for a proper Razr phone experience. The front-facing screen is 3.6 inches, but it still has a cutout for two cameras, and you can still open most apps here.
After going hands-on, it feels like Motorola knows exactly what people want from a Razr: a flip phone that feels fun again, but one that’s still powerful enough to be your everyday device. The Ultra gets the headline upgrades, but even the standard Razr keeps a lot of the charm intact. The higher prices (in the US, at least) are harder to ignore this year, especially on the Ultra. But if the battery and camera gains hold up in testing, Motorola might still have the best argument for why flip phones are worth it in 2026.
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jacob.krol@futurenet.com (Jacob Krol)
