I want Motorola to make a Galaxy Z Fold competitor, but the Razr Ultra is still tempting

Once upon a time, I was a Motorola fanboy. This was back in the day when basically everyone was, as it was in the company’s hayday. We had the Moto X and Moto Maker, the Motorola-made Nexus 6 was ahead of its time, at least in screen size, and then all of the fun just went away. For me, Motorola had a brief resurgence with its Moto Z devices, even if the idea of magnetic accessories didn’t catch on until Apple did it with MagSafe.

But then, Motorola just faded into obscurity, focusing on the sub-$300 market, and for the most part, doing a good job at it. By then, Motorola had been purchased by Google, before being stripped down and sold for parts to Lenovo. Since then, I’ve never even had so much of a peripheral desire to use a Moto phone.

And then the company released its first foldable phone, complete with the ability to make the dial pad look like the old-school RAZR that I used in high school. The needle moved a bit, but after using a couple of clamshell foldables, I decided that the book-style was my preferred design.

However, given just how long it’s been since I’ve used a Motorola phone, I have to admit that I’m intrigued by what the upcoming Razr Ultra brings to the table. Over the past couple of years, Motorola has beaten Samsung to the punch when it comes to offering a bit of innovation in the space. Mostly, when it comes to the cover screen, it continued to get bigger and simultaneously more useful.

Here’s the thing though, it’s still just a regular sized phone that folds in half. There’s no appeal in that for me, especially since I rarely even leave my house, let alone travel outside the confines of my state. So the idea of being ultra portable and pocketable is lost on me from the get-go.

Instead, I wish Motorola would have debuted its first book-style foldable phone. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold are both great in their own rights, and the OnePlus Open still holds up for most tasks. But, the Oppo Find N5 isn’t being rebranded, and we don’t know when the next OnePlus foldable will even arrive.

Motorola is so far removed from my mind that it wasn’t until now that I thought about where it could release a Galaxy Z Fold competitor. That’s with folks like Android Central Managing Editor and Resident Moto Nerd, Derrek Lee, heaping praise on Motorola whenever they can.

So there are a few reasons why I think Motorola could excel, with the first being the experience it already has. Foldable phones aren’t for everyone, and at the same time, they aren’t for every company. However, Moto has been in the game since it joined the ranks with Huawei and Samsung back in 2019, longer than Google and OnePlus.

That’s important, as Motorola has the experience of dealing with varying screen sizes and accounting for foldable states. Granted, they’ve been confined to the height and width of traditional candy bar phones, but still, that should count for something.

Another reason why I think a Moto book-style foldable would be neat is that until the Razr Ultra, the company has pretty much managed to stay under the $1,000 price point. The Ultra throws that notion out the window, with its $1,299 price tag, coming in slightly higher than the Z Flip 6 with the same amount of storage.

However, with that, you’re getting a larger cover screen, a better and less finicky experience on said cover screen, and flagship specs. That includes the Snapdragon 8 Elite, paired with 16GB of RAM and either 512GB or 1TB of storage.