From chip to battery: Motorola confirms several Razr 2022 specs (Updated)

Update: July 29, 2022 (1:58 AM ET): China’s TENAA regulatory body has listed what seems to be the Motorola Razr 2022 on its website. The listing reveals a variety of specs, such as a 6.67-inch FHD+ OLED screen, 2.65-inch external OLED display (800 x 573), 8GB to 18GB of RAM, 128GB to 512GB of storage, and an unspecified ultrawide camera.

The filing also confirms dimensions (166.99 × 79.79 × 7.62mm) and weight (200 grams). This makes it slightly wider, thicker, and heavier than the Galaxy Z Flip 3. Nevertheless, you might want to take some of these details with a grain of salt as aspects like RAM and storage could be placeholder figures.

Original article: July 28, 2022 (): The Motorola Razr was the first clamshell foldable phone to be revealed back in 2019, but Samsung stole a march on the brand thanks to its more polished Galaxy Z Flip series. Motorola is looking to step its game up with the Razr 2022 though, and it’s now shed light on some specs ahead of the upcoming launch.

Starting with the chipset, the Chinese brand revealed on Weibo that the new foldable will pack a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 processor. This is a welcome change from earlier rumors pointing to the vanilla Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC. The Plus processor packs a little more grunt while also touting major efficiency gains, so we should see better endurance with the same battery capacity compared to using the vanilla chipset.

Thankfully, we do get a battery capacity upgrade here. A Motorola executive confirmed on Weibo that the Razr 2022 will arrive with a 3,500mAh battery. That’s 200mAh bigger than the Galaxy Z Flip 3 and 700mAh bigger than the Razr 5G. It’s still very small for a conventional smartphone, but this size is expected for a clamshell foldable. The executive insisted that we’ll still see “excellent” battery life though. I guess we’ll just have to wait for a review unit to put this claim to the test.

The manufacturer also confirmed that the Razr 2022’s external display can “sit on the same level as the internal screen,” according to machine translation. This suggests that many apps and tasks can be run on the cover display in addition to the folding screen. This would be a welcome addition as Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip series requires workarounds to run more apps on the external screen.

Motorola will launch the new Razr foldable alongside the X30 Pro flagship phone on August 2. So we don’t have long to wait for all the details to emerge.