Motorola Razr Ultra Is a Retro Icon Reborn With a Design for the Future

Now that flip phones have been resurrected from the early 2000s, the novelty of a compact clamshell is facing the rigors and feature demands of today's competitive phone landscape. It's not enough to flick open your phone and look great taking a call -- although design and especially color and texture go a long way to standing out. A 2025 flip phone needs to make the most of its small components and prove that it's durable enough to endure.

The 2025 Motorola Razr Ultra is stepping forward to take that spot. With reinforced construction and style to spare, it wants you to forget about the past and embrace an experience that isn't yet another rectangular wafer of glass and metal. Does it justify its $1,300 price tag? Read CNET Managing Editor Patrick Holland's full review to find out. In the meantime, take a closer look at the new Razr Ultra.

The Motorola Razr Ultra is definitely not trying to blend in. It's available in vibrant colors like Cabaret (pink) licensed from Pantone, and the back has a fabric surface that feels better than the vegan leather on last year's Razr Plus.

The Pantone color extends to the body edges and buttons. When folded up, the Razr Ultra is just 0.62 inch (15.69mm) thick.

Motorola says the titanium hinge on the Razr Ultra is four times stronger than earlier Razr models.

This might be one of the best built phones Motorola has released in years. 

The titanium hinge (at right) is sturdy but not bulky.

When fully open, the Razr Ultra measures 6.75 inches (171.48mm) tall.

Something has to give when you fold a phone in half, and like all foldables there's a crease where the halves bend. That said, Patrick Holland reports that the crease is less noticeable and not intrusive at all when using the phone.

You can see where the Razr Ultra folds here in this still photo, but in everyday use, even playing games, it's not as apparent.

The 4-inch cover screen is the shining star of the Razr Ultra. It's a true interactive screen, not just a display: You can run most apps on it.

When you're not actively using the Razr Ultra, tenting it or resting it screen-up on a surface can still let you see the time, notifications and other info you choose.

Of course, the content on the screen flips to accommodate how you're holding the Razr Ultra. Compared to the previous image, here the phone is closed with the cameras on the bottom.

The cover screen is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass Ceramic surface.

Motorola has made it easy to manage the panels and customize the cover screen with widgets.

The Razr Ultra includes two 50 megapixel cameras with standard wide and ultrawide fields of view. There's also a 50MP selfie camera at the top of the main display.

It may seem odd at first to have the cameras (plus LED lamp) disrupting the cover screen's display, but it doesn't take long to get used to it.

The left edge of the Razr Ultra features a dedicated AI button to trigger Moto AI, the company's amalgamation of Perplexity, Google's Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot and Meta's Llama AI.

When snapped shut, the Razr Ultra takes up much less space than many other phones.