2020 has not been one of the best years it has been a flipping good year for phones. this is the moto razer 5g already in you know just in February 2020 which seems like a lifetime ago in so many ways. Now they came out with the first generation so here we are now the beginning of October and they already have a second generation.
Now when the first generation came out I didn't even do a full review of it. When I went and looked at it in the store I went to a couple of stores and the way the display was designed was so fragile it was like a piece of floating cellophane almost that you could pull off that inner display and lift up above the hinge mechanism that both stores actually within 24 hours the displays were broken kind of destroyed so you know moto didn't get us one and I said you know I'm not even going to buy one of these to review it because that's kind of dead in the water to me and the specs on the Samsunggalaxy z flip was better and they were priced about the same so I was ready to dismiss this one until I saw it and how much improvement they made the durability of this the improved mounting of the inner display.
Another thing is that we're going to look at it now so here's the deal it's right now it's 1199. If you buy it from moto direct best buy or Amazon, if you're in the carriers of the united states, will sell it for 1399 but they have a bunch of trade-in deals and stuff. I have a feeling that probably in the end it's going to be an 1199 phone and not the 1399 so-called list price but we'll find out that would make it a little bit attractive versus the Samsung galaxy z flip 5g a couple hundred dollars cheaper okay but it's still an expensive phone and I know there are always those of you out there who say I wouldn't pay more than five hundred dollars for this or something god I'd hate to meet you on craigslist and have to negotiate with you folding displays are still very expensive and then they're the duo people say it doesn't even have two displays well yes it does it has an outer display as well and that's another thing that's improved on this is an 800 by 600-pixel display 4x3 aspect ratio and it's a glass OLED display clad and gorilla glass 5.
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| Samsung galaxy z flip and Moto Razr 5G |
and they've actually given you more things you can do with instead of just swiping to scroll through your notifications standard normal android style you know tap them to maximize them and look at them and look at your email and a few things you there's actually, an option now to run any app you want on the external display, not that running youtube at 800x600 is going to be you know the best experience you've ever had in your life but it's remarkably handy to say for example I use a grocery shopping list called any list and sometimes I just want to scroll through real easy and not even have the phone open especially in COVID days where you have to disinfect your phone and stuff so it's easier to clean the outer display there are all sorts of things. If you're replying to text messages or emails they even ship it of course with a game it's a retro game that you can play on the outer display and I've seen people do crazy things like play pubg on the other display the point of that isn't that you're going to be using that all the time but you're probably going to use it more than you think and it's the biggest selling point versus the Samsung galaxy z flip 5g which otherwise just has better specs in so many different ways but with that one you get just that itsy little strip you know which just shows you a little notification icon so you know that there's a mail or there's a text and that's all about it.
You have to keep opening it up to look at it so for a lot of people that kind of kills the joy of it. With this one, you can actually read all your notifications respond to a text message response to an email.
You get the idea so it's great actually surprisingly and I like the galaxy z flip a lot while we're talking about the specs this one has the snapdragon from Qualcomm 765 g that's a 5g chipset and that's the upper mid-range or lower end of high-end depending on how you want to look at so the z-flip has the 865 plus processor so it's a bit faster but moto's optimizations and their software I'm going to talk about they're really good at mid-range phones and they have been forever in upper mid-range phones they do such good optimizations that you don't feel like you're using a slow phone.
It's not like the same way with pixels right anyway beyond that you have eight gigs of ram and 256 gigs of storage there is no micro sd card slot there isn't one on the z flip either there's just not room for that sort of thing there is no wireless charging that one kind of hurts so the z-flip does have wireless charging.
I know a lot of you folks love that z-flip even has reverse wireless charging and sorry to keep mentioning it but it is the only major competitor out here in the folding phone space so yeah all right you've got no headphone jack here but you do get a little dongle USB c to 3.5 millimeter adapter in the box for those of you who want then supports moto's turbo charging which is 15-watt charging which is kind of like standard charging.
These days for cameras those are improved as well and you know moto might not have the best cameras on the block but at least they're trying so outside we'd have a 48 megapixel and that's a quad pixel binning so a pixel pins down to 12 megapixel there's a bayer kind of sensor going on pretty fast f 1.7 lens single camera solution inside there's a 20-megapixel same pixel binning quad pixel kind of arrangement going on there you can shoot 4k video up to 30 frames per second on the outer screen and the other screen has is.
You can use the outer screen to do lots of cute party tricks and sometimes useful things you can actually display what's being taken on the outer display so say you're taking a picture of somebody else they want to see how they look you can do that. If you want to take a picture of yourself using the higher resolution camera you can do that because you can use the outer display as the viewfinder and there's another little check where it just shows happy smiley faces on the screen so if you're trying to make particularly kids or something like that laugh or giggle or whatever when you're taking their picture you've got that too so how are those cameras well they are not going to make you ditch your iPhone or your high-end Samsung phone but they definitely are improved.
The ois unless it's not active in 4k mode Motorola doesn't state that sometimes that's the case it's not as smooth as it could be mostly I would say that colours are a little a bit muted on this and it has problems with high contrast that's something that could be addressed with a software update. I don't know if they ever will though but on sunny outdoor scenes that wherever the sun is shining it's going to look a little bit whited out the default google photos app.
Now has an auto fix feature that works pretty well to bring back some of the contrast and the colour to the shots, it's like the auto hdr is kind of overdoing. If you've ever seen hdr that's taken a little too far and the scene loses contrast but gets really crispy details this one does get crispy details I mean if you're an average person who is not really into the camera that much you'll probably love this camera on the outside and the inside one's more than good enough for zoom and other torches video conferencing experiences and selfies and all that sort of thing but if you're a real camera aficionado well not even the z-flip has superb cameras there it's kind of like s10 cameras on that one you'd have to look at something like the galaxy z fold two with this triple array to start moving up in the role of foldable phones with great cameras.
Now we've talked about the outer display which is just awesomeness it's a plastic OLED display it's not ultra-thin-glass like Samsung uses. You know in some ways I'm actually okay with this because ultra thin glass can shatter so the one thing I actually liked about the plastic display that was on the original galaxy fold and well that's moto is still using it. If you drop it that's one thing that's not going to shatter at least it is an OLED display and the resolution is not it's an oddball resolution it's not quite 1080p across the narrow area which is too bad, the screen size is a half an inch smaller measured diagonally versus the z flip 5g or the original z-flip, even so, that's a little bit of hurt but honestly, I didn't really feel like it was all that small even when using the on-screen keyboard. It's a pretty nice-looking display it does have some glare outside it's that plastic kiness factor. It doesn't feel squishy because Motorola has two very large plates and you'll be able to see them when the screen is off. I'll move it around so you can see these two large plates on the top and bottom section right underneath the plastic display that keeps it very firm and they've tightened it up so it's even more, taut and the center section is where it gets to move down and into the inner hinge assembly so you'll see two very faint creases instead of the very pronounced kind of gully that the z-flip and the z-fold two have it's a nice enough looking screen it doesn't feel spongy that's the good part uh the fact that they have anchored it so much better down is the most important thing to me, this is not something unless you're a real fool and a tool and you try to destroy. It's not something you're going to accidentally destroy which the original one really I don't know how you could not accidentally destroy it's recessed down further there's we've got plastic bezels around the edges to protect it and where the hinges are open a little bit you can see the little stainless steel gears even there it's tucked inside when it's open so it's not like you're actually going to catch it with the fingernail by accident and pull it up phone is made with 7000 series aluminium stainless steel in the hinge and gorilla glass 5 on the outside.
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