Motorola Razr 50 Ultra: Cutting edge

Twenty years since the original Razr launched, Motorola has refined the flipping clamshell-style foldable into what feels like an ‘all bases covered’ smartphone, with meaningful improvements in performance, the outer ‘cover’ screen, cameras, not to forget a liberal sprinkling of AI. If you’re in the market for a flagship phone, the Razr 50 Ultra makes about as convincing a case as I’ve ever seen to move from a regular candy bar phone to a foldable…if you’re willing to drop a lakh for your next phone.

You do get a lot for all that money. Not only is there a power adapter absent from most phone boxes in this price segment, but there’s also a color-matched vegan leather protective case…plus Motorola even throws in a pair of its premium Buds+ TWS in the box to sweeten the deal. The foldable itself sees small design improvements all around – first, it finally levels up with the competition with its IPX8 rating for water resistance. The hinge is more compact, with a less noticeable crease and the ability to keep the screen open at a multitude of angles. The cover display sees an upgrade, from 3.6-inch to 4.0-inch, and it’s now a dynamic 165Hz refresh rate LTPO panel with HDR10+/Dolby Vision support, one that matches the inner 6.9-inch display and goes up to 3000 nits for the bright outdoors. Owing to its grippy vegan leather rear and 7mm profile(open)/189g weight, the Razr 50 Ultra feels great in the hand and is easily pocketable when folded.

Powering the Razr 50 Ultra is the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip which slots itself, performance wise, in between this year’s and last year’s flagship processors. There’s a single variant on sale, with 12GB of faster LPDDR5X memory and 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage, and performance is, by and large, without any hiccups save for the occasional heating during camera usage, owing to the space-constrained thermal design. Depends on how much you use either display, you’ll see a full workday’s worth of heavy usage, which is rather impressive. Even as it ships with a higher rated 68W charger, the Razr 50 Ultra is limited to 45W charging speeds, which take under 50 minutes to go from empty to a full 4,000mAh battery. There’s 15W wireless charging support as well.

Motorola’s Hello UI is shockingly bare when it comes to third-party apps, but there are plenty of finishing touches, such as the evergreen gesture controls, font/theme personalization and AI wallpapers. The ‘AI everywhere’ theme continues with Google’s Gemini AI app accessible directly on the cover display, and with support for running any app on the cover display, the cover screen is super handy, as much as the screen inside, so you don’t really have to flip it open all the time to get a lot of everyday activities done.

Now, in opting for the 2x zoom 50MP telephoto alongside the 50MP primary shooter, Motorola has chosen to drop the ultrawide camera. The main shooter captures excellent amounts of detail, with good dynamic range and details in the shadows, albeit with slightly oversaturated colors. Low light images showed restrained noise levels, and portrait shots were solid as well, with good edge detection and the right amount of natural blur. The new telephoto does its job well in daylight, with zooming up to 8x still yielding usable images. Not so in dim light, where the lack of image stabilization on the telephoto yields soft, oftentimes blurry images. Using the rear camera and the cover display for selfies comes highly recommended, since the built-in selfie camera is strictly passable.

There’s very little holding the Razr 50 Ultra back – shorter software support, the occasional heating issue and, if I’m demanding nothing but the best for the money, a true 2024 flagship chip under the hood. All things considered, Motorola's class-leading cover display and excellent software still makes it the clamshell to beat.

Rating: 9/10

Price: Rs. 99,999