Galaxy Z Flip vs. Motorola Razr: no contest By The Verge

- Hey, we are here at Samsung's Unpacked Event looking at the Galaxy Z Flip, but I decided to be sneaky and bring in the Motorola Razr and I want to compare these two phones real quick. So the first thing is both of these phones are basically the same idea. They are folding phones that fold into a portrait mode so it fits in fits in your pocket a little bit better then folds out to a very tall narrow screen. However, the Galaxy Z Flip does a bunch of stuff that the Motorola Razr kinda didn't get right. So the first thing is that it has a glass screen, instead of a plastic screen, like on the Razr, and like on other phones. And that glass screen means that you are much less likely to scratch it.

That's what Samsung claims and I kinda believe them, because I've run my fingernail over this thing and I haven't managed to scratch it, in a way where if I were doing it on the Razr, I totally would have scratched it. However, there are a couple of other differences to pay attention to, so because it's glass and because it's the way Samsung does hinges, there is a tiny little gap here that you can see when you fold it closed, whereas on the Motorola Razr, it folds completely flat. And that's because, with the plastic screen, Motorola was able to make the sort of teardrop inside the hinge when you close it so that the thing can fold completely flat. What that means though for Motorola is that you can really feel a lot of more bumps and grooves and weird things on it's screen, whereas on the Z Flip, you can feel the crease but it's a lot less prominent than it is on the Razr. The other thing I'll say is they have different ideas on how the hinge should work, beyond being gapless when they're closed.

So the Razr has a pretty loose hinge. You can kinda flip it open with one hand, it's a little bit nerve wracking to do it, but you can pull it off. The Z Flip however, has a much stiffer hinge. It is a lot harder to open with one hand, and it doesn't like, flip out. The reason that Samsung does that is they want you to be able to look at it at an angle, set it on a table and see, if you want to like, watch a video or something.

But, you know, I think there's benefits and drawbacks to both. On the whole though, I think I prefer Samsung's hinge. Samsung has a fingerprint sensor, so does the Motorola Razr. Samsung's is on the side where the power button is, and that maybe is a little bit more convenient because it's sort of one action to open it and hit the thing, whereas on the Razr, you've got to flip it open and hit the fingerprint sensor on the bottom, but the main difference here to me beyond the glass screen is the Z Flip has just way more impressive specs. Motorola, in order to get the battery life that it wanted on this thing, went with a relatively slow Snapdragon processor, I think it's the 710 and this doesn't feel all that pokey, but it's not as impressive as what's in this thing, which is a Snapdragon 855 plus.

It is also paired to 256 gigs of storage and 8 gigs of RAM. The other spec that's better on this phone and frankly the one that's way more important to me than the processor, are the cameras. This has two cameras and they're Samsung's 12 megapixel cameras, one of them is an ultrawide. And, Motorola just has one, it's a 16 megapixel sensor. And, we've got the review for the Razr coming, but I'm just going to tell you right now, that, Motorola is not as good at cameras as Samsung is so I have way more faith that the Z Flip is going to have a better camera than Motorola does.

Last and maybe not least is they both have different philosophies for what the screen on the outside should be, so Motorola has this really big thing they call peek display. You can look at notifications on it, you can take selfies with it of course, so it can get the little selfie camera up there going. And so it's like a big relatively usable display, but it's mostly sort of like a smartwatch. Samsung took the same idea, but theirs is just itty bitty. It's this little tiny display here.

You can swipe over to see notifications, you can answer calls and do a bunch of other stuff. You can even take selfies with it with that insanely tiny little viewfinder there. It's just a different idea and it's not quite as useful as Motorola's, but for me, I think that trade might be worth it because instead of having a whole bunch of screen real estate here, they have battery real estate, and the Z Flip has I think, on the whole, a bigger battery than the Moto Razr, which is again, another thing that you might want. So on the whole, what do I think? Well, we gotta get full reviews of these things out, so don't take this as final judgment, but the thing that Motorola managed to do is be first. It got out the door first.

If you could find one, they got out the door first, and good on them, but this is much more refined, and I think makes way more sense if you're interested in a folding phone. The other reason this thing is a little bit nicer, it costs less. This is $1499, this is $1380. Hey everybody, thanks for watching, like I said, we've got a review of the Razr coming, and we've already shot it. We're working on it right now and we are definitely looking forward to reviewing this thing, it comes out on February 14th and we're going to get our hands on one as soon as possible.

Source : The Verge