I have been spending way too much time staring at a screen. The weird thing is this screen is only 4 inches across. The last time I spent so much time looking at a 4-inch display was easily a decade ago, if not more! This time around the swanky new Moto Razr 50 Ultra has got me hooked, more than anything else, to its cover display.

The stylish new device landed on my desk a couple of weeks ago, I’ve got the Spring Green colour variant, although personally, I love the Peach Fuzz colourway, much chirpier than the third Midnight Blue option. The rear has a lovely vegan leather finish that offers a firm grip, with stylish shiny aluminium frames in the same shade of deep green.

The first thing that strikes me about the Moto Razr 50 Ultra is how deeply customisable the whole experience is. Toying around with the cover screen personalisation options, I can do what’s naturally expected - endless changes to the appearance, font, colours, and opacity of the wallpaper. However, it goes the extra mile and lets me customise the flip-open action to answer calls and flip the smartphone to disconnect a call. In a sweet little feature, it lets me display my dog’s photos as an auto-shuffle album on the cover display when I place it on my desk in Tent mode. I’m suddenly catapulted to my Winamp days from the 2000s when I discover I’m able to change the skin for the default music player app. Insane! After much toying around with these options, happy to explore the smartphone, I discover one last cherry on top! There are a ton of games customised to the 4-inch cover display - something I don’t think I’ve ever experienced on any other flip smartphone! Casual gaming on the external display is so much fun, that I almost forget to try them on the main bigger display.

I open up the 6.9-inch pOLED display, which feels tall and narrow in hand. Both the display - main and cover - offer a crazy refresh rate of up to 165 Hz, something you’d expect only on gaming-focused smartphones or even gaming monitors.

There’s Google Gemini integrated into the smartphone and at the time of launch the Razr 50 Ultra was the first flip phone to run Google Gemini on its external display as well! It brings in handy functionalities like writing a quick response to send over text or email, planning an event, getting quick summaries of text, getting step-by-step instructions for a task, and much more!

Camera

The primary setup on the Moto Razr 50 Ultra rests in one corner of the cover display. It includes a 50 MP main camera sensor and a 50 MP telephoto sensor. The stills taken in daylight were vibrant, with the smartphone amping up with saturation by just a little bit. As a result, bright colours really pop, even on a cloudy day. But the result isn’t exaggerated to an extent where it starts looking too unnatural. Portraits were generally nice in terms of contrast and colour tones. However, edge detection still needs a fair bit of work. Thanks to the form factor, I could use the stand mode and take a very sweet snap of my pet taking a nap under my bed. The videos I took on the smartphone were really stable as well.

The selfie camera is 32 MP and takes some lovely snaps even in low light. The results are mostly true to the original in terms of skin tone. Interestingly, I can use Google Photos to edit my snaps on the external display too! While the exclusion of a wide-angle lens is hard to ignore, I can’t say I sorely missed it.

Tech Specs

It’s also a joy to discover that there is a bare minimum number of pre-installed apps on the smartphone. The Moto Razr 50 Ultra manages to offer a clean, stock Android experience with only Moto’s own apps that cannot be uninstalled. Moto’s Hello UI has ensured that not just the main screen but also the cover screen is hugely customisable. And I’m not just talking about features and widgets. I can pinch to have an overview of all panels that are active on the cover display. And, while I wouldn’t want to have my phone half-open while on the desk, the Tent mode and Stand mode too can be customised to either show photos, the clock, customisable text, or an album cover. The Motorola Razr 50 Ultra is powered by Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, with single-spec of 12 GB RAM and 512 GB storage. It runs on Android 14 and offers three years of OS upgrades and four years of security updates.

Battery

There’s a 4,000mAh battery, which easily keeps the phone powered through a whole day of gaming, checking and responding to emails, playing around with gen AI for images and text, and taking the occasional snap or video. This is with the brightness almost close to max, as I end up using it outdoors quite a bit during the review. There’s a 68 W charger that ships with the device. It takes just about an hour to get the smartphone fully charged from zero.

Verdict

The OG foldable feature phone brand has managed to do what very few tech brands can. Build on nostalgia, yet manage to deliver functional, exciting, meaningful, deeply personalised features on a classy-looking foldable smartphone. There are niggles, of course, but the camera doesn’t go hard in low-light conditions. Some of the generative AI features such as Magic Canvas take forever, when they work, and while operations are still smooth, the smartphone doesn’t sport a flagship-grade processor. Having said that, as any brand should, Motorola has mitigated these issues by building in so many capabilities that you’ll be too occupied having fun to notice what’s missing!

Price - ₹99,999 (12 GB + 512 GB)

Pros - Great UI features that make the most of the cover display, meaning AI feature additions, decent battery life,

Cons - No ultrawide camera, not a flagship-grade processor, fewer years of upgrades compared to competitors.

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