Motorola's new Razr Ultra landed in stores May 21 at $1,499.99 -- $200 more than the 2025 model it closely resembles. It runs a Snapdragon 8 Elite, unfolds to a 7-inch screen, packs a 5,000mAh battery with 68W charging, and shoots with a triple 50MP camera system. Motorola pinned the price bump on "the rising costs of memory chips, driven by AI demand." It doesn't sell through carriers. Check out this random dude review it:

1. It's the Best Flip Phone You Can Buy (the enthusiast)

Best-in-class is best-in-class. The hardware actually delivers.

The Razr Ultra beats Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 7. Reviewers keep landing on the same verdict -- TheShortcut calls it "still the best flip phone," and the consensus is great performance, improved cameras, and genuine all-day battery.

The specs aren't marketing fluff. The 50MP main camera draws praise for daylight color and sharpness, the 5,000mAh silicon-carbon battery matches the much larger Galaxy S26 Ultra, and 68W charging refills it fast.

2. It's a Copy-Paste Reskin (the value skeptic)

Same phone as last year, $200 more. That's not an upgrade, it's a sticker swap.

Last year's phone with a $200 hike is hard to justify. Android Central titled its review "Copy and paste" -- great hardware, but barely changed from last year and saddled with a price surge for no obvious reason.

The no-carrier thing makes it worse. With no subsidies to soften the blow, you pay the full $1,499.99 up front, which is why MakeUseOf called it "simply a non-starter" at that price -- a great phone you'd enjoy more if you didn't know what it cost. The skeptics' out: wait for the discounts that usually come after launch.

3. Don't Blame Motorola -- It's the AI Memory Tax (the macro read)

The $200 isn't greed. It's the same chip crunch coming for every gadget you own.

The price jump is the memory crisis showing up in your pocket. Motorola and its reviewers pin the $200 squarely on the rising cost of memory chips, which AI data centers are buying up faster than fabs can make them.

It's the same force that just hit the Steam Deck. Valve pushed its handheld to $789 and $949 over the identical crunch. IDC expects average PC prices to climb up to 8% this year. A flip phone stuffed with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage is exactly the kind of device that gets taxed -- so the fight over Motorola's greed misses the point. The Razr Ultra is just where you noticed.

Where This Lands

The reviews mostly agree on the hardware: this is probably the best flip phone you can buy right now, and it beats the Galaxy Z Flip 7 on battery, cameras, and speed. They split on whether that's enough at $1,499.99 -- the skeptics see a copy-paste of last year's model with a $200 hike and call it a non-starter, while the enthusiasts figure best-in-class is worth paying for. And the macro read reframes the whole argument: if that $200 is really the AI memory tax, the same one that just pushed up the Steam Deck, then blaming Motorola misses what's actually happening -- the price of everything with a chip in it is drifting up.

Sources