This story was updated on March 9th. Update below.
As Google and Samsung repeatedly slash prices of their flagship smartphones, Motorola is now following suit by discounting its latest foldable Razr range.
The company is running a new “daylight savings” deal which knocks up to 25% off of some of its hardware. The most interesting deals are for the Motorola Razr and Razr Plus 2023, which are $200 and $300 cheaper respectively.
It looks like Motorola has discounted almost all of its product range, including the Edge, Edge Plus and cheaper handsets like the Moto 5G. The real draw here, though, is the heavily discounted Razr series, which is the company’s most impressive piece of tech. See my thoughts on the foldable device here.
Both Google and Samsung have been aggressively discounting their latest smartphones for the last three months. Be that through bundle deals, increased trade-in prices, random store credit vouchers, or straight-up slashing the upfront cost of the device. Smartphone manufacturers vying for market share in this way isn’t unusual, but the consistency—and depth—of discounts is.
Motorola released the Razr in June last year, so there’s a good chance that the 2024 Razr will land at a similar time this summer, which might explain the sudden discounts. Samsung is expected to release its Fold 6 and Flip 6 this summer, too. The Korean company is also running a deal right now for its Fold 5 and Flip 5 by offering increased trade-in prices for old phones, but there’s no money off the device itself.
Having tested both flip phones, they are fairly equally matched. Samsung’s handset has a better camera, but Motorola’s cover display is bigger and sharper (although some apps have sizing issues). Where they differ is software support. Samsung’s Flip 5 offers four years of Android updates and five years of security patches. Whereas the Razr will receive three major OS updates and four years of security patches.
Motorola has improved its software support policy over the years. Buyers of previous models were promised two years of Android updates and three years of security fixes. The 2020 Motorola Edge initially launched with only one year of support promised, but later increased to two after some criticism.
Motorola’s trajectory of support is good, but it still doesn’t match the Flip 5. Samsung has also upped its policy to seven years of support for the Galaxy S24 and I suspect it will do the same for the Fold 6 and Flip 6.
This should be part of your buying decision because you’re not saving much money if the phone has to be replaced in two years. With that said, the Razr Plus is $420 cheaper than the Flip 5 right now, so if you’re hunting for a foldable phone and you have a hard budget, this is a solid deal. If you can wait, I expect we’ll see some aggressive pricing from Samsung, Google and Motorola when they release their next-generation foldables in the summer.
March 9th update: As Motorola clears its existing stock with this sale, some information about the company’s next generation of handsets has surfaced. As reported by Android headlines, the new Motorola Edge Plus 2024 will have a 50MP rear camera with a 6x zoom, although the report doesn’t state if that’s an optical zoom.
It also has a curved 6.7-inch display with a 165Hz refresh rate, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor and a 4500mAh battery with 50W wireless charging. Elsewhere there are three new colors; off white, purple and black—all matte. Based on the images, it looks like the white-ish color has a brushed-metal effect.
Motorola has some work to do challenge the other major Android manufacturers, specifically Google and Samsung. The company’s popular foldable Razr range goes some way to doing that, but it looks like the company is also getting into the AI game. A Chinese teaser trailer for the new device that was published last week specifically mentions AI. It’s not a surprise that one of the established names in Android would go down this route since AI is in vogue, but I’m intrigued by how the company deploys AI in its devices. Does Motorola have its own language model? Or will the Edge Plus release with Google Gemini deeply integrated into the phone’s experience? We’ll know more when the device lands this year.
