I Finally Tried a Flip Phone (Moto Razr Plus 2025)
I've spent years shouting from the rooftops about the magic of folding phones. If you’ve followed my work at all, you know I’ve been a massive evangelist for the big-screen life. From the Galaxy Z Fold and the Pixel Fold to the OnePlus Open, and even those sleek devices from Honor and Oppo, I’ve tried them all. My logic was always pretty simple: folding phones are incredible because they give you a massive canvas for multitasking and productivity that a normal slab just can't touch.
Flip phones, on the other hand, never really made sense to me. My favorite foldables were getting bigger to help me get more done, but flip phones take a standard smartphone and just make it smaller. It was a concept that never really spoke to me because I couldn’t see the utility in it. Still, I decided it was time to finally put that bias to the test and see if I was missing something by ignoring the flip side of the foldable world.
Recently, I came across a deal on Woot that was too good to pass up: the Moto Razr Plus 2025 for only $379. To be honest, my biggest motivation for buying it wasn't a sudden change of heart about the flip form factor. I really just wanted to get some hands-on time with Motorola's version of Android. With the Moto Razr Fold, their new book-style foldable, on the horizon, I wanted to see how their software handled the foldable experience before that larger canvas arrived.
It also felt like the right moment to finally give this style of phone a fair shake. I figured if I was going to test a flip phone, it might as well be one that didn't break the bank. After spending significant time with it, I have to admit I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I actually like using it.
The first pleasant surprise was just how much I enjoyed having my pocket space back. I’ve become so used to carrying around massive slabs or heavy book-style foldables that I forgot what it felt like to not have a literal brick in my jeans. Even though modern foldables like the Z Fold 7 or the Oppo Find N5 have become impressively thin when closed, they still have a significant presence.
The Razr Plus 2025 is a different story. Its footprint is so small when folded that carrying it feels more like having a set of earbuds in my pocket than a flagship smartphone. It’s also quite a bit lighter than my folding phone at 189g, which makes a noticeable difference throughout the day. Having that much less bulk while still knowing I have a full-sized phone when I need it has been a really refreshing change of pace.
The cover display has been a delight to use, and I have found myself interacting with it a lot more than I thought I would. Granted, the two cameras punching holes through the screen do get in the way and can be a bit restrictive. But even with those interruptions, I’m finding real utility there. For instance, I can open Google Keep to check my grocery list while I'm shopping without ever unfolding the phone. It is much easier to use with one hand, so if I’m pushing a shopping cart, the whole experience is just more comfortable. When opened, the Razr does feel pretty darn tall to me as well, so it’s no wonder the cover display feels easier to one-hand.
I’ve also started responding to text messages directly from that cover screen using dictation. I don’t really have any desire to type on a display that small, but hitting the microphone button on Gboard and firing off a quick text works surprisingly well. It’s also been great for controlling YouTube Music. Changing tracks while I’m listening with my earbuds scales perfectly to a screen this size. I’ve even caught myself watching a YouTube video on it while preparing lunch. When it’s closed, it really does feel like a tiny micro-phone, and it’s honestly pretty cool.
The camera on this specific device has been a bit of a mixed bag. The primary sensor takes better shots than I thought it would, with a nice amount of punch and contrast. The colors feel fairly natural, and they aren't going way overboard like some Chinese manufacturers tend to do. However, that 2x zoom isn't super useful beyond portrait mode. If you actually want to zoom in to something like 4x, it looks pretty bad. For portrait mode, you do get a nice focal length and the blur looks good enough for me, so that’s likely what they were aiming for with that lens.
Moto gets extra credit for the double-twist to launch the camera though. That has been awesome for a long time.
Battery life has been just okay, although in the last couple of days, it does seem like it’s getting better. It is a device that will get me through the day, but not by a lot. I would say it’s similar to the Z Fold 7, but maybe just a touch worse. That's interesting because it uses a lower-end processor, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, and the battery is 4,000 mAh. It’s been a little disappointing but still decent enough for my daily use.
Performance has been largely pretty good. Normal things like opening and closing apps feel smooth, and the animations look nice. Installing apps from the Play Store is relatively fast, too. I have noticed little hitches and stutters here or there where you realize you are using a slightly less powerful chip, but it hasn’t been anywhere near a deal-breaker. It still feels like a fast and smooth device overall.
Then there is Moto AI. For the most part, the AI features they’ve built in seem relatively smart, and there’s a sense of intentionality behind them. However, it often feels like a worse version of Google Gemini. A lot of the functionality is just being duplicated, and it’s unclear to me why I would use their suite instead of Google’s. Pretty quickly, I just stopped using it altogether. It’s also worth mentioning that when I first set the phone up, the AI stuff didn't work at all. It took about three or four days and plenty of troubleshooting, which ended up not doing anything, for it to suddenly start working on its own.
One unexpected benefit, if you can even call it that, is that it doesn't feel like a device I'm supposed to be getting work done on. Because of that, my use of the phone has naturally shifted. I’m not spending nearly as much time checking for breaking news or frantically writing down notes for upcoming videos and articles. I’m also not doing any split-screen multitasking where I’m referencing a source in one window and typing in another.
It feels much more leisurely. As someone who tends to overwork and struggles to pull away from that next project, it has almost been a relief at times. I could see this being a tremendous weekend phone. It gives you all the power of a modern smartphone when you need it, but the form factor itself encourages you to just slow down and use it for the basics.
This experience actually reminds me of using those specialized keyboard phones like the Titan 2. On a device like that, the square screen just isn't built for certain tasks, so you naturally stop doing them. When the Razr is closed, it almost feels like a Titan 2 where you're meant to use voice-to-text rather than a physical keyboard.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll be surprised by how much you end up doing on that cover display instead of opening the device, and your usage just naturally shifts. When you compare it to a book-style folding phone, the difference is night and day. On a Fold, the hardware is constantly begging you to do more, to open another app, and to be more productivity-focused. The flip is the exact opposite. It’s a complete departure from that "always-on" workflow, and that shift in how I interact with my tech is something I didn't realize I was looking for until I had this in my pocket.
Putting it all together, my experience has been much more positive than I ever expected it to be. I initially thought this was going to be a quick experiment, something I’d use just to get a feel for the Motorola software before putting it away. I even figured my wife might end up grabbing it and using it once I was done. Instead, I keep getting drawn back to it.
I actually took my SIM card out and put it back in my Pixel Fold, but a day later, I was swapping it back into the Moto Razr. Something about this experience just keeps pulling me in. For someone who has been almost exclusively using book-style folding phones for the last five or six years, it has been a total breath of fresh air and, honestly, more than a little surprising.
