Motorola's Next Razr Foldable Faces Steep Competition From Samsung, Huawei

The history of the foldable phone is not quite what most people think. Samsung announced its intentions early, but it was Royole that actually shipped the first commercially available foldable—the FlexPai—though few people outside China ever saw one. When Motorola revived the Razr name in 2019 and released it months later, the company could claim something more meaningful: the first clamshell foldable that people could actually buy in stores. That distinction mattered. The original Razr was a cultural artifact, a phone that defined a generation. A modern clamshell foldable bearing that name seemed like it might recapture some of that magic.

It didn't. The 2019 Razr arrived with compromises that made it feel less like a finished product and more like a test run. It lacked 5G connectivity. The version of Android it shipped with was already more than a year out of date. For a phone that cost real money, it read as a proof of concept—evidence that Motorola could engineer a foldable, not evidence that the company was serious about winning the market. The Razr 5G, released a few months later, addressed some of those shortcomings, but by then Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip was already on shelves, positioned as a premium device with specs to match. Motorola found itself competing in the mid-range, outgunned on paper. The one genuine advantage it held—and still holds—was the size of its external screen, larger than what Samsung or Huawei offered. It was something, but not enough.

Then Motorola disappeared from the foldable conversation entirely. Lenovo, the company that owns Motorola, said almost nothing about the category for months. The silence suggested that the Razr foldable experiment might have been a brief detour, a brand exercise that didn't justify continued investment. The market moved on without them. Samsung consolidated its position in the premium clamshell space, pricing its devices competitively enough that they competed directly with traditional flagship phones. Huawei entered the arena with the P50 Pocket, a device that looked formidable on paper, though the company's ongoing export restrictions meant it would never reach most Western markets.

But the silence was not surrender. In late 2021, Chen Jin, a Lenovo executive, posted on Weibo about the company's plans. He acknowledged the 2019 Razr, reflected on what it represented, and promised that Motorola was not stepping away from foldables. A new Razr was coming, he said. It would have more powerful processors. The software would be refined. The physical design would improve. The specifics remained vague—whether these improvements would translate into flagship-level specifications was unclear.

What is clear is that Motorola's path forward is steeper than it was two years ago. The first-mover advantage in clamshell foldables is gone. Samsung has spent that time refining its approach, building supply chains, and establishing itself as the default choice for consumers willing to spend on a foldable. Huawei, despite its restrictions, has proven that the category can attract serious engineering talent and design ambition. Motorola will need more than nostalgia and a bigger external screen to matter this time. It will need to deliver something that makes people forget that Samsung and Huawei exist—or at least makes them wonder if they should. Whether the next Razr can do that remains to be seen.