The Motorola Razr 40 is the most important foldable of the year

OPINION: Motorola has just unveiled two new flip-style foldables – the Motorola Razr 40 and the Razr 40 Ultra. While there’s a lot to get excited about with the new top-end foldable, it’s the Razr 40 that should get most people excited.

Why? Its release is heralding a new era of foldable smartphones – one where they cost less than standard flagship smartphones. 

Since the release of the first foldable smartphone back in 2019, there has been one consistency regardless of brand or design: a high price tag. That’s still certainly the case for larger book-style foldables like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 or the upcoming Google Pixel Fold, with the latter starting at an eye-watering £1,749, but we’ve started to see the price of clamshell-style foldables slip over the past few years.

Take the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip for example; the first-gen foldable launched at an astonishingly high £1,300, especially when you consider the distinctly mid-range specs that were available at the time. Over the past few years, that price has slowly come down, until we hit the first sub-£999 foldable with the Galaxy Z Flip 4. That’s a welcome trend, but that’s still pretty expensive for a smartphone.

Motorola was next to play its hand, pricing the Motorola Razr (2022) at a slightly more tempting £949, before being undercut by the Oppo Find N2 Flip’s £849 price tag at release earlier this year. Now, with the Motorola Razr 40, you can get the full foldable experience for as little as £799, making it the most affordable foldable smartphone to date. 

You might assume that, coming in at £250 less than the flagship Razr 40 Ultra, there’s a compromised experience on offer, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, in many areas, including the use of a vegan leather rear for added grip and protection, the two are eerily similar. 

It’s not just the use of premium materials either; the Motorola Razr 40 sports the same upgraded teardrop hinge as the Ultra model, as well as the same 6.9-inch pOLED foldable display though with a slightly slower 144Hz refresh rate and a smaller 1.5-inch external display resembling that of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4. 

In fact, in some areas, the standard Razr 40 seems to surpass its premium sibling, like with the inclusion of a high-res 64MP main camera with OIS and pixel-binning tech compared to the 12MP snapper from the Ultra model, along with a slightly higher-res 13MP ultrawide and the same 32MP internal selfie camera. 

While the Ultra does have some things going for it, namely the wide f/1.5 aperture, it’ll be interesting to see just how similar the two smartphones are in terms of camera performance.

It also has the larger battery of the two at 4,200mAh, compared to the 3,800mAh cell of the Ultra model.

Again, this is all at a price point cheaper not only than the Razr 40 Ultra but every other foldable smartphone on the market in 2023, and with better specs on offer too.

Mark my words; the Motorola Razr 40 is the beginning of a new age of affordable foldable phones when it’s released in the UK, US and Europe in the coming weeks.