The new Razr Ultra is still the best-looking phone ever

Look, you won’t find much new in the 2026 edition of the Motorola Razr Ultra. There’s a new main camera sensor, a slightly larger battery, and a higher price: $1,499, up from $1,299. But one thing hasn’t changed: it’s a very good-looking phone.

The wood-finished back panel returns, joined by a new suede-like Alcantara option in Oriental Blue. To everyone who has complained to me over the past year that “phones are boring now,” which is a lot edge Reader, please take a look at these phones. They are definitely not boring. They feel cute, look pretty, and can be photographed prominently.

This is the good news. The bad news is, well, it’s 2026. $1,499 gets you the same 512GB and 16GB RAM storage configuration that was $200 cheaper last year. It comes with the same Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset as last year as well. There’s a 5,000 mAh silicon-carbon battery compared to last year’s 4,700 mAh battery, and a larger 50-megapixel main camera sensor compared to the one on the 2025 Ultra. The updated camera also claims better HDR performance thanks to a new sensor technology called LOFIC. These are good upgrades, but the price increase is likely related to a lack of memory.

There are some minor updates as well. The internal display is capable of providing up to 5,000 nits of brightness compared to 4,500 on last year’s model. The external display is protected by Gorilla Glass Ceramic 3, which claims to have better drop performance than the previous version.

Along with the other two Razr devices, the Ultra offers some new camera tricks. When shooting video in camcorder configuration with the device bent 90 degrees, you can tilt the entire device left and right to zoom in and out. You don’t see this movement in the final clip, as the device uses the gyro sensor and image stabilization mechanisms to correct it in post-processing and keep the horizon steady.

There’s also a mode called Frame Match that’s designed for those moments when you need to hand your phone over to someone else. You take a reference photo with the frame you want and then pose in front of the camera — whoever you hand your phone to will see the photo overlaid so they can match the composition. The idea is to prevent anyone from accidentally leaving out the part of the background you want to capture. I’m personally very wary of trying to explain this concept to a stranger taking a photo of my family, but it seemed to work well enough when I played with it.

Like the rest of the Razr 2026 series, the Ultra will be available for pre-order on May 14 and will arrive on May 21.

Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge