Motorola Razr Plus vs Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6: Which should you buy?

Part of the strong appeal of falling in love with a flip phone is figuring out how to use the big screen — or at least, how not to. The difference in these terms between the Motorola Razr Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, therefore, are illustrative of just how divergent the flip phone techniques can be. In terms of experience, the Samsung experience is regulated and codified while the Motorola experience and the tricks you can pull off with it are entirely open-ended. Instead of folding apps into the squarish window of a notebook’s folder, Samsung’s system forces them into an equally small square window confined within a folder-shaped panel of the phone’s cover screen. Meanwhile, Motorola’s approach lets the apps stretch their skeletons across the entirety of Razr Plus’s cover screen even when the camera cutouts are in the way — imperfection that, strangely, has become something of an attraction for me.

Yes, Samsung could have switched out its latest Flex Window from the 3.4-inch Super AMOLED panel it had already built for the Galaxy Z Flip 5 – but if few have tried a flip phone and even fewer have bought one, it also hasn’t been able to fix what people (or at least me) didn’t like about the complicated software experience, either. Unfortunately, this still requires Good Lock to put apps other than Maps, YouTube, and (sigh) Google Messages (not Samsung Messages) in your app drawer. Of course, I jumped through the hoops to get the rest of my apps on the Flex Window, but I needed that how-to article on Quartz that I’d written a year ago for the Galaxy Z Flip, because it’s essentially the same software process. Again, it feels like an over-engineered solution to a problem that Motorola just ignored: apps optimised for tall, thin phone displays don’t run particularly well on short, square cover screens.

Sorry, Samsung, but one app drawer is always better than two.

To its enormous credit, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 comes with a solid set of widgets, laid out so that you can fit multiple widgets on each panel of the Flex Window. And now it almost starts to function like a giant Galaxy Watch or a very small Nest display. Some, like the Spotify widget, necessitate a layout unto themselves, but it feels nice to have my calendar and weather forecast right there alongside an easily accessible voice recorder – even if they don’t deliver quite as much information at a glance.

And yet, I think I still prefer Motorola’s experience. The Razr Plus gained precious breathing room for 2024, stretching from its mini-midsize 3.6 inches to 4 inches of flat AMOLED flow-through, spanning almost the entirety of top half of the phone, thanks to its near seamless display design. Like Sammy, Motorola overbuilt the feature a bit, going for a variable 165Hz refresh rate and up to 2,400 nits of peak brightness. But unlike Samsung, Motorola earned a bit more room by cramming in almost 100 more pixels per inch into its sleek screen. Motorola’s cameras stick out a bit less, too, hidden in lower, more rounded housings that wink at our digital desires of staying wedded to what’s old, instead of sticking hard to what’s new.

Design and specs aside, what I like most about Motorola’s cover screen is the software experience – and its eager embrace of ugliness. It’s kind of backward, I admit, after just spending the last few paragraphs explaining how short, square apps don’t work very well on tall, thin displays. At least Motorola lets them try it, putting as much of its screen as possible towards the task for you. Add any app to your cover screen drawer by flipping a toggle, and Motorola shipped a button to push apps over the camera cuts so that they don’t cover up the interface. Hand a Moto Edge+ to a friend, like I did with a colleague and a barista, and let them doom scroll their Instagram, watch a few minutes of House of the Dragon on a display it was never designed to be viewed on, or try and outscore their fellow tech journalists in Freekick Football without opening the phone.

But Samsung doesn’t have dibs on the better widgets, either: Motorola’s aren’t quite as malleable — you can’t stack them on top of each other, so you can’t have (say) a folder of widgets on one page — but they offer much more information right out of the gate. My Razr Plus came with several games in its widgets, access to my contacts, the weather and my calendar — all out-of-the-box, and frankly, few apps to cluster in the singular drawer that came with it. The Galaxy Z Flip 6, in contrast, came with precisely one widget: the weather in the corner of one panel, and the rest of the learning to be done by you. Some people might prefer that malleability; but if they were also coming fresh off the farm, so to speak — never having used a flip phone — that could create a steep learning curve.

This stuff doesn’t make the Razr Plus any kind of underdog, at least not anymore – beneath that folded housing and embedded face mask there is something of the underdog, and there lurks a worn, old mentality behind the phone. Underdogs rarely have the privilege of being bigger and stronger. Instead, this character type is history’s original Cinderella story, a plucky upstart, an unlikely champ. To beat your superior opponent – whether Chick Hicks, Davy Jones or the Globo Gym Purple Cobras – you’ll have to think differently, try new angles, new ideas, and injuries. As much of one to follow suit, Motorola appears to have thought differently about the cameras on its new Razr Plus. And that, I feel, is the rub.

Rather than sticking with the wide/ultrawide combination we’ve become accustomed to on flip phones – ermm, and just about any other dual-camera device – Motorola doubled down on portrait mode. It upgraded its 12MP primary camera to a 50MP snapper with greater detail; and then replaced the solid 13MP ultrawide camera with a 50MP telephoto with 2x optical zoom. All other things being equal, I’d be ecstatic because I’m no huge fan of the ultrawide field of view, but the very notion of a telephoto sensor in this form factor… it doesn’t sit right with me.

And Motorola is all-in on portrait mode … but limits the cover screen to 1x zoom.

Bear in mind, it’s wonderful that a dual-camera flip phone can zoom as far as the triple-camera Galaxy S24, but that’s not where phones in this class are strongest. My preference for Razr Plus and the Galaxy Z Flip 6 is to use them closed, with their large primary sensors feeling like superpowered selfie cameras. And when you do that, a user shouldn’t be zooming beyond 0.5x or 1x before you’re thinking you want access to the telephoto sensor. Maybe even more confusingly, the Razr Plus won’t let you zoom higher than 1x on its cover screen, storing up all of its portrait power for when it’s open.

When it comes to the Galaxy Z Flip series, though, Samsung has been living the Hollywood underdog vs rival story pumped into our veins for decades – and its results show that it knows what works. It kept at it. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 has the wide and ultrawide camera pairing that’s been with it since the start but, in this case, armed with a 50MP primary sensor for the bulk of your shooting (up from 12MP), so long as the shadows aren’t too dark. Oh, and zoom: Samsung has gone with a crop of the main sensor for its 2x optical zoom, at least compared with the 1:1 combiner used for its horizontal and vertical axes. Behold its zoom proof It’s not just the Z Flip 6 that does this – Motorola does, too. The downside is that because cover glass is smaller, the pixel size is smaller, but both phones crop the sensor down to allow for that extra blurriness, locking in smaller individual pixels as a trade-off. Motorola tends to do this by default at 1x, right from the start, but Samsung applies a crop only when you engage. Which, on the Samsung, means it’s smart enough to allow cropping on the cover screen, Zoom away The benefit of this is more hardware for the other focal lengths: where Motorola settles on the single-sensor 85mm at 2x, Samsung uses the bulk of its 50MP sensor for 1x shots and uses the upper corners (which Samsung notes have slightly smaller pixels and thus a tad more light-attracting power) for its 2x.

Samsung’s flip phone now supports Expert RAW, if you ever wanted more camera settings precision Finally, there’s the kicker – sure, you can use the real camera if you want, but it’s more fun to basically just pull up the front cameras and take them anyway. And, if you’re going to do that, Samsung’s new Auto Zoom makes framing much more approachable, bringing in a picture, automatically zooming in a bit and then cropping when you make a gesture to take the photo. It’s no instantaneous recognition – the camera and face tracking takes a second of so – but I’m somewhere between amazed and relieved by how much easier it’s made life. Taking pictures with friends is such a chore of trying to hold the camera straight and hopefully your finger won’t get into the shot while all your buddies land their faces in the frame, but now no one really

Here are just a few shots and some of my thoughts from both cameras:

Motorola Razr Plus

There’s something a bit unfair about the Galaxy Z Flip 6 that I’ve spent more quality time with the Motorola Razr Plus, but that’s how it goes. I’ve been travelling with the Razr Plus for several outings, including its own launch event at Brooklyn’s House of Yes, a trip to the Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore and an Orioles game. At each stop, I’ve put it through its paces and taken note of a few things, including that I’m not sure it needs a telephoto camera. Don’t get me wrong: it’s fine that it exists at all, and 2x optical zoom is fine and will come in handy at times, especially when Windows has been scaling down everything else into a shrunken world. Pretty much everything above 4x is digital, and it all looks pretty rough, the 30x image of the player at home plate more like an impressionistic painting.

Shadows are also something the Razr Plus doesn’t handle well. In the second row of photos above, you can barely discern the centres of the metal flowers around the archway, and even though we were in the middle of a sun-drenched warehouse, the selfie it took of my friend Derrek darkened his face to the point where we both looked a bit jaundiced. Still, I shot Paris Hilton back in the day with a Razr – Paris Hilton, the original Razr influencer – so there’s that.

As mentioned, I haven’t spent quite as long with the Galaxy Z Flip 6, but it’s long enough to notice a few things. For starters, I definitely missed having an ultrawide angle during my time with the Razr Plus. Living in a tall city, there are plenty of times when you want to fit just a little bit more in your shot. Also, Samsung definitely skews to a darker color profile. The mural of a jaguar is lighter in real life, and the statue of two lacrosse players is as well. Sometimes, the darker hues work out for Samsung — its greens are still extremely punchy, but I don’t think I’d call it true to life.

Things like recording video from either side and taking selfies on the internal cameras generally come out in the wash. The Razr Plus (2024) and Galaxy Z Flip 6 support up to 4K video at 60fps, 1080p at 240fps, and HDR10 Plus from their primary cameras, both with optical image stabilization. Motorola’s 32MP punch hole selfie camera and Samsung’s 10MP option are both fine, too, but I’ve hardly used either one because of how much better the primary cameras are.

The modified chipset is one of only two significant weaknesses our ex-underdog has against the odds of toppling the Galaxy Z Flip 6. However, its chipset can’t quite keep up. Ironically, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 and its precursor, the Razr Plus, ship with the same base hardware, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. However, the modified variant of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 simply can’t compete on the same footing as Samsung’s overclocked Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy. In cinema terms, Anakin Skywalker’s podracer simply doesn’t gain the same thrust from its engines as that of Sebulba’s.

Spoiler alert: Anakin wins the Boonta Eve Classic in the end, but it’s not raw power. If it was, he’d lose every time, just like your Razr Plus does in nearly all of our benchmarking tests against the Galaxy Z Flip 6. The difference isn’t massive – the Geekbench 6 single-core test was well within the margin of error, the PC Mark test was close – but Samsung’s flip phone opens up a far wider gap on graphics. In the Wild Life test, the Z Flip 6 started with three times the score, and after 20 runs, it was still more than 50 per cent higher than its rival. Much of the graphics divide comes back to the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 using an older GPU, so sometimes grabbing the latest chip makes sense.

This isn’t because it’s a Razr Plus — far from it, in fact, as it handles everything just great and feels robust enough to get you through a multi-faceted day of use — but it is because the cover display’s really good (yes, REALLY good!) that you’re probably not going to see too many of the advantages of Samsung’s faster chipset. To be clear, both chipsets are more than well-equipped to handle day-to-day tasks, and even light gaming, for plenty of time.

Where the Razr Plus puts points on the board, then, comes down to battery life and its corresponding charging experience, not unlike Anakin, who may not be more powerful but can last longer, and get back up faster. The Razr Plus and the Galaxy Z Flip 6 have 4,000mAh batteries, and while Samsung’s flip phone did run away in our battery drain test – in one category that matters to smartphone obsessives: 4K video playback – it more than doubled the Razr Plus’ accomplishment, and that’s great news for anyone who watches a lot of high-resolution videos. Beyond that category, Motorola at least nudged ahead in Zoom calling, web browsing, camera snapping and even in gaming battery life, a combination of which you’re likely to do more of during the day.

Motorola owns another category (pun intended): charging. The Razr Plus (2024) gets Galaxy S24 Ultra-class 45W wired TurboPower charging, which is faster than the Galaxy Z Flip 6’s 25W wired speed if you plug into a compatible charger – and it can go faster than that once again if you look outside Samsung’s ecosystem. The two leather-look foldables are tied at 15W wireless charging, but Motorola earns a third bonus here in reverse wireless, too, with 5W versus 4.5W.

Oh, and s buzzword, AI! But hey, supporting on-device AI features is one of the biggest reasons why both the Snapdragon models in the table are highlighted by Samsung and Motorola. It’s game on to see how fast the two companies can launch their respective features.

So far, like any good underdog tale, Samsung is winning. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 is ahead in all facets of Galaxy AI-powered features, with things such as Auto Zoom, Sketch to Image, and Portrait Studio coming to One UI 6.1.1. They’re new wrinkles on top of Circle to Search, Live Translate, and Photo Assist, all existing in previous Samsung generations. I’m beginning to rely on

Moto AI on the Razr Plus needs to catch up Motorola is only willing to offer some of its generative features on the Razr Plus right now, specifically two iterations of wallpaper generation: Style Sync and Magic Canvas. You can also find a couple of camera wrinkles: Adaptive Stabilisation and Action Shot. But the best generative magic of this Razr Plus will come … some day. It took Motorola more than a year to get Android 14 on its last Razr Plus, so who knows what ‘some day’ will really mean.