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VPNs for ad-blocking Now that we’re at the fourth generation of consumer foldables they can’t rest on their novelty alone. It isn’t enough for a foldable phone to just be able to fold, it needs to live up to its asking price. It needs to be a good phone, not just a good enough foldable phone. With an asking price up there with the flagships you’d expect quality parity along with it, but the latest gen Razr still needs improvements before it can run with the big boys. Snaps from the Razr’s main and wide angle lenses are simply disappointing. Despite the high MP count, they lack detail, and colour depth, making the shots look flat. You’ll also notice blowout around lights and lighter colours like white, which can somewhat be counteracted by shifting the exposure down before shooting. In saying that, with nice natural lighting you can still get a good snap but these are harder to achieve than the alternative. The rear camera also struggled to capture movement, with almost every picture I took of a moving subject coming out blurred. You’ll notice some blur around the squeezy bottle as well as the vendor’s face in the street food shot below, and more on the bubbles in the beer. While four hours isn’t going to let you miss an overnight charge, it should be enough for most users to get through a full day. You can eek this out further by opting for a dark mode display, and turning on battery saving features but I didn’t find it necessary. Considering the relatively low 3,500mAh capacity, I anticipated a much shorter run but it is worth noting that where you are can make a big difference in battery performance. For the first few days of testing the Razr I was in South Korea, a country with a very different mobile set up to Australia. While abroad using a local eSIM I was only seeing two hours of screen time per charge, which doubled once coming back to Australian networks and an Aussie SIM card. If you plan on travelling with the Razr it may be worth investing in a battery pack that supports fast charging. Performance has however had some hiccups. Response times between commands and the action can be slow at times, and at others downright clunky. Occasionally opening the phone didn’t trigger the screen and at others the screen would go black while waiting for an app to load. These quirks were few and far between, but were there nonetheless. More concerning than any small glitches, the device comes with two major operating system updates and three years of security updates. Security updates for Android are still lagging behind iOS devices but Google and Samsung have started to make headway offering up to five years of updates as of late. While that is still a couple of years behind Apple’s historical support, it is a massive jump which only makes the Razr support look worse. Moreso, the Razr ships with Android 12 and the first said update is to Android 13 which is already out on most flagship Androids. Once folded the device has a large 2.7-inch AMOLED display which has almost the same functionality of the internal display. Samsung’s Z Flip series have a similar display screen at about half the size, which is just big enough to read part of a message and see a couple of notifications. With the Razr’s large display you can navigate on Google Maps, read and reply to messages, and even scroll through Instagram if you really want to. The functionality allows you to actually keep your phone folded more, saving battery in turn but it’s a double edged sword. I have never taken so many pocket photos in my life. Half of my camera roll is just black pictures of the inside of my pocket from when I forgot to exit the camera app before closing the device. With all the functionality on the external display, I even managed to pocket-dial someone in my Instagram DMs. It was a true throwback to the early 2010s. Unfolded the phone is large, about the size of the iPhone 14 Pro Max albeit a touch thinner. I’m not a fan of big phones - small hands - but the foldable form factor does make it easier to handle. The internal display is beautiful and bright, and has the smoothest crease I’ve seen yet in a foldable. You can still see the fold at certain angles but it is less prominent than the Z Flip series visually, and tactilely. And the foldable nature of the Razr is a pleasure. Its minimal crease and the large external display give it a better practical design, and more impressive engineering than the Samsung Z Flip range, even if it isn’t as colourful. But I still think it is asking too much without offering enough in return.
