Motorola Brings the Razr Back Again, This Time With 5G

Motorola just took the wraps off the Razr 5G, a refresh of last year’s flip-phone foldable that fixes some of the obvious gaps in the original without touching the core idea. It’s still a clamshell that folds down to fit in a pocket, still built around that flexible display and small external screen, and still priced well above what most people spend on a phone: $1,399.

The headline addition is right there in the name. The original 2019 Razr launched without 5G at a moment when carriers were just starting to light up their networks, and it felt like an odd omission on a phone that was already asking buyers to pay a premium for novelty. This version adds 5G connectivity, which at least brings it in line with where the rest of the high-end phone market has been heading all year.

Motorola also bumped up the battery and gave the phone a performance upgrade over the original. Battery life was one of the more common complaints about the first Razr, so a larger cell here is a welcome, if overdue, fix. Pairing that with faster internals suggests Motorola is treating this less like a brand-new product and more like a patch release for the first one — smoothing over the rough edges rather than reinventing anything.

Why this matters more than a spec bump

Foldables are still a tiny category, and the Razr in particular is more of a fashion statement than a value play. At $1,399, nobody’s buying this because it’s the best phone for the money. They’re buying it because they want a phone that folds in half like the flip phones of the 2000s, and because Motorola has actual brand equity in that shape thanks to the original Razr’s run in the mid-2000s.

That nostalgia angle is still the whole pitch. The question is whether adding 5G and a bigger battery is enough to convert curious onlookers into buyers, or whether the fundamental problem — a high price for a phone that’s still working out the kinks of foldable displays — remains the bigger obstacle. Folding screens are a genuinely new mechanical challenge, and durability concerns haven’t gone away just because the marketing has moved from “look, it folds!” to “look, it folds and has 5G!”

I’ll be curious to see how this compares to Samsung’s foldable lineup, which has taken a different approach with larger unfolding screens rather than a clamshell form factor. Motorola is betting that familiarity — a phone shape people already know and have affection for — wins out over raw screen real estate. It’s a reasonable bet, but $1,399 is still asking a lot of that affection.

For now, the Razr 5G reads as Motorola doing the sensible thing: take the criticisms of round one, address the ones you can (battery, speed, network support), and see if round two lands better with the same core concept. Whether the category as a whole finds its footing is still very much an open question heading into next year.