Motorola Razr Ultra: the most powerful flip yet, with a 5,000-nit screen and a LOFIC camera

• The Razr that finally gets the flagship chip — Snapdragon 8 Elite, not the step-down Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 in the book-style Razr Fold
• Brightest screen on any flip — a 7.0″ inner pOLED at a 5,000-nit peak, plus a 4.0″ cover display that also runs at 165 Hz
• A 50 MP LOFIC main camera — Motorola's first, which it says captures up to 6× the dynamic range of the 2025 Ultra, with 8K Dolby Vision capture
• Biggest battery in a flip — 5,000 mAh of silicon-carbon, with 68 W wired and 30 W wireless charging
• Materials you won't find elsewhere — PANTONE Orient Blue wears Alcantara, PANTONE Cocoa wears real wood veneer
• World's first flip with Corning Gorilla Glass Ceramic on the cover, behind an IP48 rating
• $1,499.99 in the US, €1,299.99 in Europe as the Razr 70 Ultra
• One real catch: just 3 OS upgrades — stingy next to the seven years Samsung and Google now promise

Motorola split its 2026 flip line into three — Razr, Razr+ and Razr Ultra — and the Ultra is the one with nothing held back. It was unveiled on April 29, 2026, went on pre-order in the US on May 14 and reached shelves on May 21 at $1,499.99; the rest of the world gets the same phone as the Razr 70 Ultra, rolling out over the following months.

The interesting context is internal. This is the same year Motorola also launched the book-style Razr Fold, and on paper the two look like siblings — but the Ultra quietly gets the hardware the Fold went without, starting with the chipset. Motorola's pitch is blunt and, for once, mostly earned: "the most powerful razr ever." It's a clamshell that stops apologising for being a clamshell.

Closed, the Razr Ultra is 15.7 mm thick and weighs 199 g — open it thins to 7.2 mm. That weight is the headline: it is genuinely light for a flagship flip, and it disappears in a pocket in a way the 243 g Razr Fold never will.

Motorola spent its design budget on materials you can feel. PANTONE Orient Blue is wrapped in Alcantara with a micro-lattice weave; PANTONE Cocoa uses a natural wood veneer with visible grain — finishes no rival flip offers. The cover glass is the world's first use of Corning Gorilla Glass Ceramic on a flip, and a titanium-reinforced hinge folds the phone shut with no gap.

Water resistance is IP48: in practice it survives a drop in the sink or a rain-soaked walk — submersion to 1.5 m for 30 minutes — but the leading "4" means it is only guarded against solid particles larger than 1 mm, so it is water-resistant rather than fully dust-tight. Worth knowing before you take it to the beach.

The inner panel is a 7.0-inch FlexView LTPO pOLED at 1224 × 2992 (22:9), 10-bit colour with HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, refreshing from 1 to 165 Hz — and peaking at 5,000 nits, which Motorola calls the brightest interior display on any flip. Going by published spec sheets it deserves the claim; flip inner screens are usually the dim, compromised half of the device, and this one is neither.

The cover display is a 4.0-inch QuickView LTPO pOLED (1272 × 1080) — among the largest external screens on any clamshell — and, unusually, it also runs at 165 Hz and hits a 3,000-nit peak. Both screens are 10-bit and Dolby Vision certified, so the small one isn't an afterthought: you can genuinely run apps, reply to messages and frame photos on it without opening the phone.

Here is where the Ultra separates itself from the rest of the Razr family. It runs Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite (TSMC 3 nm, octa-core 3rd-gen Oryon up to 4.47 GHz, Adreno 830) — the genuine 2026 flagship tier. The book-style Razr Fold, by contrast, shipped with the step-down Snapdragon 8 Gen 5; getting the full Elite into a body this small is the upgrade enthusiasts wanted, and it's the one most worth celebrating here.

Memory is simple and generous: 16 GB of LPDDR5X across the board, with 256 GB or 512 GB of UFS storage. There is no anaemic base model dragging the line down.

The Razr Ultra carries a 5,000 mAh battery — Motorola says the largest in any flip phone — and it gets there using a silicon-carbon cell, the chemistry that packs more capacity into the same space. After years of flips stuck around 4,000 mAh, this is the figure that finally makes a clamshell a sensible all-day phone.

Charging matches the ambition: 68 W TurboPower wired (Motorola quotes a day's power in roughly eight minutes), plus 30 W wireless and reverse wireless for earbuds. As is now standard, there is no charger in the box — in Europe or the US.

The Ultra's headline is its main camera. It is a 50 MP sensor with next-gen LOFIC — a lateral-overflow design that holds far more light per pixel before it clips — paired with an f/1.8 lens, a 1/1.56″ sensor and OIS. Motorola's claim is specific: up to 6× the dynamic range of the 2025 Razr Ultra, meaning brighter highlights and deeper shadows kept in the same frame, with 8K Dolby Vision capture on top. For a flip, leading on sensor hardware rather than software tricks is a real statement.

The second rear camera is a 50 MP ultra-wide (f/2.0, 122°) that doubles as the macro lens, and selfies come from a 50 MP inner camera — though the sharpest self-portraits use the two rear cameras with the cover display as your viewfinder. Video tops out at 8K/30, with 4K up to 120 fps.

Two honest caveats. There is no telephoto, so all zoom is digital — the trade-off of the clamshell shape. And while the Razr Fold earned a DXOMARK Gold Label this year, that score belongs to the Fold, not the Ultra; the Ultra has no independent camera score yet, so judge it on the sensor, not a number.

The Razr Ultra ships with Android 16 and Motorola's moto ai suite — Catch Me Up, Remember This, Next Move and more — triggered by a dedicated AI Key, with Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity all available out of the box. The cover display does real work too, running apps and a camera viewfinder without opening the phone.

Then comes the one number that undercuts the whole package: Motorola commits to 3 OS upgrades and 4 years of security patches. On a $1,499 phone, in a year when Samsung and Google both promise seven years, that is hard to defend — and it is the clearest reason to pause before buying. A phone built this well deserves software support that lasts as long as the hardware will.

In the US the Razr Ultra has been on sale since May 21 at $1,499.99 for the 16 GB + 512 GB configuration, with the 256 GB model below it. Internationally it sells as the Razr 70 Ultra, rolling out across Europe and other regions in the months after the US launch — Motorola staggers these releases market by market, so availability and stock dates vary by country.

European pricing lands at €1,299.99, with the UK at £1,199.99 — which, once you account for tax and conversion, actually undercuts the US sticker. There is no charger in the box in any market, and as with every flagship the Ultra's street price will drift below MSRP as launch promotions land.