A budget flip phone stuck in place

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Introduction

The Motorola Razr 70 isn’t the most exciting foldable on the market, but it might just be the most accessible.

Priced at just £799.99/€899.99 (or $799.99 for the Motorola Razr 2026, as it’s known in the US), this compact flip phone undercuts the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 by £250. It even comes in cheaper than its closest rival, the £849 Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE.

It’s no small matter to offer any sort of value proposition in a smartphone in 2026, with margins squeezed tighter than ever. Sure enough, compromises have been reached to hit such an aggressive price point.

Most notably, there’s a clear sense of inertia when you compare the Razr 70 to its predecessor, the Motorola Razr 60. Does it do enough to justify its existence?

Design

• Exactly the same dimensions as the Razr 60
• Motorola’s unique material finishes present
• IP48 rated

Thank goodness for Motorola’s way with punchy Pantone colours and tactile material finishes. Without them, you’d struggle to tell the Razr 70 apart from the Razr 60.

The dimensions here are identical at 171.3 x 74 x 7.3mm when open, with exactly the same weight of 188g. That makes it a pleasingly easy phone to cart around, particularly when you fold it in half and stash it away in a pocket.

It’s a little bigger than the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE (its most direct rival), but weighs in about the same.

As for those colours, you have a choice of Pantone Hematite with a woven finish to the rear, Pantone Sporting Green in soft luxe, and Pantone Bright White with an acetate finish. My test model is the Pantone Sporting Green, which has a slightly turquoisey tint and a nice diamond ridge texture to its plastic back.

I find it slightly less visually appealing than Samsung’s flip phone design, but easier to hold and to live with day to day. That textured rear makes it better to grip, while the rounded edges make it easier to pry the phone open.

On that latter point, the titanium hinge isn’t particularly stiff, but it will remain propped open on a flat surface at anything between 60 and 120 degrees.

There’s IP48 dust and water resistance, just like the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE. If you’re wondering why the initial dust resistance rating is so low, it’s a problem with the form factor. Mechanical hinges continue to be a weak point for any flip-style foldable when it comes to particle ingress.

As we’ve come to expect from this current generation of flip phones, there’s a thumbprint sensor stashed behind the power button on the right edge. It proves fast and reliable, and is quite intuitive to access in both closed and open formations.

One persistent peeve I have with Motorola’s flip phones is the positioning of the NFC point in the lower half of the phone, which pretty much demands that you keep it closed when tapping for payments. Samsung doesn’t struggle in this way.

Screen

• Decent quality 6.9-inch internal OLED
• 3.63-inch 90Hz external OLED
• Pantone Validated main screen

For a third generation running, Motorola has stuck with the same pair of Razr displays. On the one hand, this speaks to a lack of progress, and more widely of the component pricing pressure that’s forcing manufacturers to make conservative decisions.

On the other hand, these remain fine displays that outperform their Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE counterparts on all of the major metrics.

The internal screen is a large 6.9-inch OLED with a 2,640 x 1,080 (FHD+) resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. With a 3000 nits peak brightness it can stand up to direct sunlight moderately well. As ever with foldables, the plastic screen protector (which mustn’t be removed) can make things look a little smudgy.

There hasn’t really been any progress on that internal hinge bump either, which means that you have a noticeable ridge bisecting the display at the halfway point. It’s easy enough to ignore when there’s a lot of content on screen, thankfully.

The external display is a 3.63-inch OLED with a 1066 x 1056 resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate. Again, that’s better than the equivalent Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE component in almost every respect – though at 1700 nits, it doesn’t get quite as bright.

All in all, however, the Razr 70’s larger, sharper and more uniform external display is simply far more usable than its rival’s. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it’s quite viable to type out a quick message on this smaller screen using the virtual keyboard.

Motorola’s UI is open to more kinds of apps running on that screen too – albeit in a reduced fashion.

Camera

• Same 50MP main camera as the Razr 60 and 50
• New 50MP ultra-wide
• 32MP selfie camera

Motorola hasn’t shaken things up with the Razr 70’s main camera. It packs the same 1/1.95-inch 50MP sensor with the same f/1.7 aperture as both the Razr 60 and the Razr 50 before it.

That’s a shame, as I wasn’t too impressed with this camera’s performance in previous models. It’s a relatively pokey sensor for an £800 phone, producing shots that lack the sharp detail and rich contrast of similarly priced non-foldable phones. It also falls short of the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE’s main camera.

Indoor shots demonstrate the limitations of this sensor, with a pronounced softness, not to mention a lens (or image processing) that seems to have difficulty with strong light sources. Check out the food shot in the gallery below, where daylight streaming in from a nearby window really bleaches things out.

Night shots, too, exhibit clear signs of grain and murk. They’re passable, but you might expect more if you’re accustomed to spending this sort of money on traditional smartphones.

In the absence of a dedicated telephoto camera, zoomed shots have to crop in on this humble main sensor, and the results aren’t good. Detail drops off markedly even at 2x, while 4x and 10x shots have that fuzzy, bloomy effect that speaks to the lack of raw information that’s necessary for such close-ups.

Where Motorola has shifted things along a little is with a new 1/2.76-inch 50MP ultra-wide, replacing the smaller and less pixel-dense 1/3.0-inch 13MP sensor of its predecessors.

It’s a smart move, as last year’s model would see a big drop off in quality when you zoomed out to take a wider view. The new camera still falls well short of that main sensor, with notably cooler colours and less dynamic range, but there isn’t such a detail disparity.

The 32MP front camera produces adequate selfies, but I’d argue that it doesn’t really need to do any better. Just flip the phone around and the camera app will detect your face, automatically turning the external screen into a viewfinder. In this way, you can take much better selfies than even most flagship non-foldable phones.

It can even be set to shoot when you smile, or to set a shot timer when you hold up your palm – both of which work well.

New to the camera provision this time is Frame Match, which lets you frame a shot yourself before having a friend or bystander take over while you step into the scene. All they need to do is match up the ghost image and snap to take the exact shot that you want.

It’s a nice idea for all those photography control freaks out there, but I can’t imagine it being too practical to deploy in the real world. If someone doesn’t have the awareness to take a good shot of you in the first place, will they understand how this novel feature is supposed to work?

Performance

• MediaTek Dimensity 7450X with 8GB RAM
• Smooth general performance
• 256GB storage

The MediaTek Dimensity 7450X chip fitted in the Razr 70 is only a very minor upgrade on the Dimensity 7400X of the Razr 60. It features an identical CPU and GPU layout, with only a small boost to AI performance and an updated 5G modem to justify the name change.

Together with the same 8GB of RAM, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that performance is very similar indeed to the previous generation. My Geekbench 6 results suggest that there’s been an 8% bump in CPU multi-core performance, but you need to consider that these two tests were run about a year apart, so driver updates should be a factor.

Whatever the case, the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE scored 78% higher in the same test back in August. This is distinctly mid-range performance, and you might expect better for your £800.

For all that, general performance proved to be smooth enough during my time with the phone, and with 256GB of storage, there’s plenty of room for apps and media.

Gaming is possible, though Destiny Rising will only run on medium graphical quality settings, and will be locked to the lower ‘Standard’ frame rate setting at that.

For whatever reason, our usual 3DMark Wild Life Extreme tests refused to run here, so I can’t provide too many comparative GPU benchmarks. From my experience with the Razr 60, though, I can tell you that it’s likely to fall well below the Flip 7 FE once again.

Ultimately, when it comes to performance, Motorola’s entry-level foldable can once again be found treading water. In an area where it was already weak, that really isn’t good enough.

Software & AI

• Android 16
• Range of Moto AI features
• 3-year OS support, 4-year security

The Razr 70 runs on a relatively unadorned version of Android 16, but Motorola’s UI isn’t quite the clean, close-to-stock Android experience it used to be.

I will continue to praise the inviting Moto app, which collects all of the company’s bespoke features together with handy tips. Motorola’s gesture-based shortcuts, meanwhile, are some of the best around.

However, there’s a whole heap of extraneous third-party apps pre-installed, clogging up the home screen. LinkedIn, Amazon Music, Facebook, Instagram, Disney+, Prime Video… it’s a lot. You also get Opera on top of Google Chrome, which seems pointless.

The company even tries to push a bunch of poor-quality games at you in an unwanted extra folder.

Two other third-party apps that I haven’t mentioned are Perplexity and Copilot, reflecting Motorola’s ‘throw everything at the wall’ approach to AI. Add in Google’s Gemini, and that’s three flavours of AI assistant at your fingertips straight out of the box.

That’s not even mentioning Motorola’s own Moto AI suite, which draws from various third-party tools for a selection of productivity tools (note transcription, contextual screenshots, etc.).

Motorola might argue that there are different use cases for all four of these provisions, but there’s an undeniable degree of overlap. Three of the four AI chatbots were able to draw me a picture of a newt in a sombrero reading a book when I asked them to, for example.

The Razr 70 offers a fairly mediocre amount of software support, too. You’ll get just three major OS upgrades, and a mere four years of security updates. That pales next to the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE’s flat seven years.

Battery Life

• 4800mAh battery
• Comfortable all-day battery life
• 30W wired charging, 15W wireless

Despite its unchanged weight and dimensions, Motorola has somehow managed to add extra capacity to the Razr 70’s battery.

It now sits at 4,800mAh, which isn’t big compared to a non-foldable, but which dwarfs the 4,000mAh cell of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE.

In my experience, this is sufficient to see the Razr 70 through a full day of use with ease. I would get to the end of a light-to-moderate day of working from home, with about 2 hours and 30 minutes of screen time, and would be down to around 40%.

This was with 30 minutes or so of gaming, too, which is about the most power-sapping thing you can do with a phone.

All in all, that’s reassuringly solid rather than amazing. Following in a similar fashion is the 30W wired charging provision, which proved sufficient to gain me a 67% charge in about 30 minutes.

A full charge will take you just over 50 minutes.

It’s worth noting that I achieved these speeds using a Samsung 65W charger, reflecting the fact that you don’t need to worry about owning a Motorola-branded brick to charge at full speed. Which is a good job, because you don’t get one in the box.

Elsewhere, 15W wireless charging is also possible.

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Should you buy it?