I tried Motorola's Razr Fold months before release – Samsung has new competition

Motorola is the granddaddy of folding phones, its original Razr flip phone being the most famous – from way back in 2004, before a reimagined relaunch in 2020 brought the range up to date and kicked off a new revolution.

Now Motorola is getting into the foldables game, teasing its forthcoming folding phone, the Razr Fold, at the CES 2026 consumer electronics show – and I got to try it out months ahead of its release. Its final release date isn't known, other than it'll be "this year".

What's clear from the outset is that Motorola has a serious Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 competitor on its hands. This 6.6-inch device unfolds to be an 8.1-incher, taking on the best of the current market by being the largest (if I'm excluding tri-fold devices from that statistic anyway).

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It's clear that brands are fairly settled on a chosen format for folding devices, though, with the Razr Fold taking on the same benefits and burdens as any foldable – namely the folding display's coating being a bit of a fingerprint magnet.

Motorola's real secret weapon is being pitched as its cameras, however, with a rear section containing a trio of key shooters, all of which are 50-megapixels in resolution. There's the main camera, a wide-angle, plus a 3x periscope zoom.

At this stage, however, the software is far from its final stages, so the Camera app was locked out of reach and I wasn't able to dig deeper into how it might perform. Same goes for the duo of selfie cameras, too, the 32MP external and 20MP internal cut-outs.

While this Razr is clearly a Samsung competitor, one key difference is that it offers Moto Pen Ultra stylus support, so you'll be able to use it for multi-tasking, note-taking and so forth – something the Galaxy Z Fold 7 lacks (unlike its predecessor).

That's down to the Razr Fold containing the necessary panel for reading such input, but as a result it doesn't feel to me like quite as thin a phone as Samsung's. That's a very hotly contested area of competition, especially when considering other examples, such as Honor's Magic V5.

It'll be interesting to see how Motorola's latest foldable fares in this pricey and ultimately niche landscape. Don't expect it to launch in all regions, mind, as markets vary – and I'd be surprised to see it go on sale in the USA.

Time will tell, though, and in the coming months I'm sure Motorola will tease more information ahead of the device's eventual launch. The camera capabilities, stylus support and Motorola's typically savvy take on Android could be enough to raise it above the competition, based on what I've seen at these early stages.