I swapped Samsung for a rival flip phone – you should make the same decision

Flip phones peaked in popularity in the mid-2000s before being usurped by BlackBerry and eventually iPhone and Android devices. For a while, the humble flip was a marker of a simpler time for mobile communication.

In 2025, phones that flip are back, and they now signify that you want a cutting-edge call maker, and you don’t mind forking out for the privilege. Since Samsung showed the world you can fold an OLED screen in half, several Android makers have followed suit with flippers of their own.

I’ve been testing the latest modern incarnation of perhaps the most famous flip of all, the Motorola Razr. The original was released in 2004 and paved the way for phone design with, for the time, its unbelievably thin form.

The Motorola Razr 60 Ultra bears little resemblance to its 21-year-old predecessor, but after a month of testing, I prefer the newest Moto to its obvious rival in the market, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, a phone I’ve reviewed and used for several weeks. At £1,099 the Razr isn’t cheap, but I think it’s worth the extra £50 over the £1,049 Galaxy. You get 512GB as standard too, more than Samsung.

The Razr has a more interesting design, a larger and more technically useful outer display, great battery life, solid cameras and relatively clean Android 15 software. In fact, it’s only Motorola’s underwhelming software update promise that holds me back from whole-heartedly recommending the Razr 60 Ultra with no reservations.

You’ll get three years of Android OS upgrades to Android 18 and four years of security updates from launch, meaning it’s the end of the road for this phone in 2029. Samsung offers seven years of updates on the Z Flip 6, taking you to 2031 and conceivably Android 22.

But aside from this, the Razr outperforms the Galaxy in almost every other area. It’s a fun phone to use, and that’s very valuable in 2025, when most phones are boring grey glass slabs. My Razr review sample came in a gorgeous Rio Red, one of four Pantone colours you can get it in. None are dull, though the wood effect one is an acquired taste. My red model has a faux-leather back, which is nice and grippy.

The edges of the Razr are slightly curved, which makes the phone far more comfortable to hold than the flat-edged Z Flip 6. Even though the phone isn’t really physically smaller, it feels like it is. This helps when it’s unfolded, as the screen is taller than regular slab phones in order for it to be a roughly square shape when folded shut.

The aforementioned pouter display is the killer feature here. Unlike the Z Flip 6, Moto lets you run any app on this mixture display with no restrictions, meaning you can use maps, text or take a photo without opening the phone. Even though the camera lenses are in the way you can choose to expand any app to fill the dinky 4-inch OLED. It’s very cute running Google Maps on this thing, and could encourage you to use your phone less – scrolling on social media is hampered here, so responding to a text quickly on the outside screen then putting the phone away might stop you falling down a doomscroll hole.

Both this and the inner screen are amazingly high-spec with maximum refresh rates of 165Hz, even if they don’t use that smooth-scrolling tech all the time (they adapt depending on what you’re doing and app compatibility).

The 7-inch inner display is excellent and gets bright enough to see outside, though as it’s plastic-covered, it collects a lot of smudgy fingerprints. The crease in the middle of the screen is less pronounced than on the Z Flip 6 too, but you can still see and feel it.

Motorola, which is owned by Chinese tech giant Lenovo, has changed its mind after it equipped last year’s Razr 50 Ultra with a main and 2x telephoto camera. Instead, the 60 Ultra has dual lenses but a main and ultra-wide, using the main to crop to 2x. This makes sense as you now get the best of all worlds.

Despite the versatility, this is not the best phone camera for the price. Folding phones often compromise on picture quality as the sensors must be quite small for the form factor, and so it is here. But equally, only the fussiest of phone photographers will be disappointed by the 50MP main sensor, which can take sharp and colour accurate images just fine.

Images from the 50MP ultra-wide are a little over-saturated, but everything is social-media and sharing ready. This lens also doubles as a macro camera, and the results are impressive.

This phone isn’t about the cameras though, it’s about style and quirky features. I particularly like Moto’s tent mode, where you can prop up the phone and the outer screen will stay on as a clock or with album artwork and controls if you are playing music. It’s all very customisable, as is the software Motorola ships with Android 15. It’s less cluttered than Samsung’s One UI and can keep out of your way if you want it to.

And Moto’s longstanding double-chop action to turn on the phone’s torch and double hand twist to launch the camera app are still superb software secrets.

Unlike many pricey phones, the charger is in the box, and can top up the Razr at 68W speeds – incredibly fast. The battery easily lasted me a day on this phone too, but with 4,700mAh this is not a two-day phone.

Unfortunately, Moto has finally jumped on the AI bandwagon, but mercifully you can ignore most of it. Like many Android phones, you have Google GeminiAI baked in but also the manufacturer’s own AI tools. With Moto, you have to register for a Moto account to turn some of these on, which is annoying but understandable.

Allow permission to process your data, and the UI can summarise your notifications, which is quite handy in a feature called ‘Update me’, but like Samsung and other phone rivals, Moto is taking very tentative first steps into this young technology.

At its heart, the Razr 60 Ultra is a little slab of fun, and that’s when it’s at its best. It even has the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, the best Android processor you can get right now. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed carrying around this maroon slab of flip phone, and suggest you opt for this model over the Z Flip 6 if you want a small folding phone with the right balance of design, features, cameras and battery life. The inspired outer display is the icing on the cake.