Foldable phones have swaggered back into the spotlight, and now Motorola is doubling down with the Razr 2025 lineup — a trio sporting the Razr 2025, Razr Plus 2025, and Razr Ultra 2025, each designed to tickle the fancy of both nostalgiacs and the next-gen crowd who want artificial intelligence served with their pocket technology. But this year, Moto has done something truly bold: they’re bundling a cornucopia of AI experiences, including not just Google’s Gemini, but also Perplexity and Microsoft CoPilot, all under the glitzy banner of Moto AI 2.0. Buckle up, because these flip phones are about to school traditional slabs on what it means to feel futuristic.
A Folding Phone for Every Flavor (of AI)
Motorola’s folding ambitions are now more than skin-deep. With the Razr 2025 series, it’s not just about showing off a hinge mechanism that could make a yoga instructor envious. Motorola has stacked this lineup with three distinct devices — and behind each is a silicon brain humming with different levels of AI horsepower.Let’s start with their out-of-the-box charm. Every device comes with Google Gemini set as the default voice concierge, ready to field your perplexities (pun intended). But here’s the twist: Motorola isn’t playing favorites. You also get Perplexity and Microsoft CoPilot preloaded and ready for action. Moto’s giving you three months of Perplexity Pro for free, presumably to let you see what a paid chatbot can do—beyond telling you the weather or coming up with creative sandwich recipes.
For IT professionals, it’s a bit like being asked if you want your morning coffee from Starbucks, Dunkin', or delivered straight from a robot barista. All options are there—consumer freedom, or perhaps analysis paralysis, at its best.
Tailored Intelligence: Not All Foldables Are Created Equal
Beneath the shiny folds, each Razr is powered by a different processor. Why? Because AI performance is no longer a marketing bullet point; it’s a battlefield.Enter the Razr Ultra 2025, the crown jewel of the bunch. It wields the mighty Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, featuring a neural processing unit with a staggering 80 TOPS (trillion operations per second). That’s more computational flex than most desktop PCs from a few years ago, and just enough to allow local execution of Meta’s Llama 3.2 model. For the uninitiated, Llama 3.2 isn’t livestock. It’s the latest darling of open-source LLMs, and it’s powering one of Moto’s flashiest new tricks — Look and Talk.
The “regular” Razr 2025 and Razr Plus 2025 get different chipsets with correspondingly different AI on-device capabilities, but they’re still in the game for most Moto AI features, just not the full-tilt, Llama-wrangling showcases.
Is Motorola subtly gamifying the AI arms race by equipping different models with varying neural might? Of course. You want all the bells and whistles? Pay for the Ultra. Prefer last year’s engine with a hint of future flavor? The base Razr is still plenty smart—just don’t ask it to outpace the Ultra at AI chess.
All Hail Moto AI 2.0: Now With More Winks and Context
The real star of the show is Moto AI 2.0, Motorola’s umbrella for a suite of AI-powered features. This is not just another “Hey Google” with an attitude adjustment—they’re building something uniquely Moto.Let’s break down what you’ll actually use:
- Look and Talk (Ultra exclusive): Make eye contact with your foldable, and it springs to life, serving up info or interpreting your next digital need—all without you touching or talking to the device. Think of it as the phone equivalent of a butler who knows you’re about to ask for something just by your glance.
- Catch Me Up: Struggling with notification overload? Tell Moto AI to “Catch Me Up” and you get curated summaries—like an executive assistant who skips the fluff and delivers the hot topics.
- Remember This: Quickly saves things you care about—screenshots, ideas, random moments—and retrieves them at your embarrassing command.
- Pay Attention: Voice recordings, started on demand and instantly transcribed so you can catch every detail, whether you’re in a meeting or halfway through an existential rant.
Here’s the kicker for IT folks and digital productivity buffs: features like “Next Move” take things further by actually analyzing what’s on your screen and proactively suggesting next steps. Did you just read an event invite in your messages? Moto AI can suggest blocking out calendar time, spinning up a playlist for the event, or even generating an image to accompany the invite. This is context-aware AI—think Clippy, but with a PhD and less incessant waving.
A Boring Button, a Dedicated AI Key, and the Real-World Workflows
In typical Motorola fashion, the new Razr series comes with a few ways to interact with AI: you can make eye contact (on the Ultra), tap the device, use voice, or—brace for excitement—press and hold a dedicated AI key.A physical button for AI might feel retro, but there’s sound logic here. When you’re buried in notifications, running between conference rooms, or juggling coffee and phone, a tactile shortcut to summon digital assistance could be the frictionless magic act you didn’t know you needed. For now, critics might scoff—another button!—but us IT types remember the days when a programmable button was the ultimate productivity hack.
What About Privacy and Security? (Otherwise Known as: How Much Does Moto AI See?)
No self-respecting IT journalist worth their Lenovo laptop would overlook the obvious elephant in the server room: privacy.If your AI can read what’s on your screen and suggest next moves, it needs access to a lot of sensitive data. Motorola has a job on its hands to reassure enterprise customers, privacy wonks, and regulatory hawks that their AI stays on the right side of PII boundaries. We haven’t seen a full whitepaper’s worth of detail from Motorola—yet—but with all that AI muscle working on-device (especially with Snapdragon’s NPU), there’s hope that much of your private data won’t be taking midnight trips to the cloud.
And let’s be honest: in today’s “AI in everything, everywhere, all at once” landscape, edge-compute privacy is the ace up the sleeve. Will Moto win over the skeptical CISO before the next rash of headlines about leaky AI? Only time, and perhaps some brave IT admins, will tell.
Perplexity, CoPilot, and the LLM Smorgasbord
Motorola’s inclusion of multiple AI “brands” is downright fascinating. Gemini, Perplexity, and CoPilot each have their strengths, their quirks, and history of sometimes stepping on each other’s toes (looking at you, clashing notification banners).For power users, this means genuine choice: want a conversationalist? Use Gemini. Prefer an AI that can source answers with citations? Perplexity’s your bet. More of a Microsoft 365 devotee who dreams in spreadsheets? CoPilot will feel like home. It’s a polyamorous AI household, and your digital life gets to benefit.
But this setup isn’t without potential pitfalls. Multiple AI assistants can lead to a digital cacophony, as they each jockey for attention. If you’re not careful, you could end up asking Gemini to summarize an email, having Perplexity chime in with extra sources, and then letting CoPilot schedule the follow-up—while Moto AI watches in judgment. Multiply this by an office full of Razr-toting colleagues and the IT helpdesk might want to start a pool on who has the messiest notification history.
Razor’s Edge Pricing: Almost Sensible?
Let’s address the wallet. The new Razrs are up for pre-order at $699.99 and up. The entry ticket may look high, but in foldable phone terms, it’s more “happy hour margarita” than “Michelin tasting menu.” At this price, Motorola undercuts some of the larger, stiffer competition, which often prices their flippy slabs like they’re an exclusive invite to the metaverse.And for that money, consumers get not only pizzazz and pocket-pleasing design, but also enough AI extras to drown out doubts about feature parity with the Big Two (Apple and Samsung).
For IT departments mulling device upgrades, the cost equation tilts interestingly. If Moto’s AI features can genuinely slash time spent on repetitive digital tasks or automate the weekly status update (dream big!), the productivity ROI could be meaningful—especially when compared to more buttoned-up, less adaptable platforms.
The Real-World Implications for IT Professionals (or, “Will This Foldable Break Your Helpdesk?”)
Let’s cut through the marketing fog: Will Motorola’s AI-packed foldables make IT support better... or just more interesting?On one hand, the robust suite of built-in AI capabilities—especially with on-device processing—means fewer cloud dependencies and potentially less bandwidth hogging. That’s a win for mobile workers. The ability to summarize notifications, manage screenshots, and transcribe audio without bouncing everything through external servers is a tangible security and productivity boon.
On the other hand, a phone that listens to context, reads screens, and juggles multiple AI personas is a phone that can (and will) trip over obscure settings, permission conflicts, and user confusion. Helpdesks might soon field calls that begin, “My phone keeps talking to itself” or “Why is Perplexity answering my Teams messages?” Expect a learning curve as users figure out how all these AI “friends” coexist, and as sysadmins strategize on policy settings to keep everything in check.
The Hidden Risks—And Why Motorola Can’t Afford a Misstep
Lest we forget, AI feature creep comes with risk. Every proactive suggestion, transcription convenience, and screen-reading widget is a possible attack vector or privacy misstep. Motorola will need to keep policies clear, update cycles brisk, and user permissions transparent to avoid the kind of breach headlines that could turn this year’s darling gadget into next season’s punchline.But, risk breeds reward. Moto has an opening here to position itself as the foldable with a conscience: private, fast, and helpful—without shipping your life’s story to every data center from Mountain View to Redmond.
When Can You Join the Fold (Pun Absolutely Intended)?
Pre-orders for the new Razr lineup open May 7, with a general on-sale date of May 15. Techies and fashionistas eager for a phone that’s both stylish and (allegedly) smarter may want to mark their calendars and prepare their pocketbooks.One tidbit that might sweeten the deal: your entry price isn’t just the cost of the phone, but a ticket into a peculiar new mobile reality where AI can be as subtle or as sprawling as you configure it.
The Moto Buds and Watch—The Sidekicks We Deserve?
Not content with launching just phones, Motorola is also rolling out the Moto Buds Loop and a new Moto Watch Fit. Details here are delightfully sparse, but the implication is clear: Moto wants your whole ecosystem, and the AI-driven smarts won’t be just for phones much longer. Expect voice-assist-powered earbuds and context-aware health nudges from your wrist before long.If you’re the IT admin in the family, brace for the onslaught of “how do I pair my watch with my AI?” texts.
Will Moto AI 2.0 Actually Change Your Day?
The ultimate question for real-world pros and everyday users: does any of this matter, or will we all just fold open our phones to check Slack, Twitter, and maybe take a selfie from an awkward angle?Here’s the optimistic take—if Moto AI 2.0 is as seamless and context-aware as advertised, it really could redefine the pace and polish of mobile productivity. Saving time by summarizing notifications, remembering key data, and auto-transcribing conversations is the kind of small, cumulative magic that can add up to serious productivity wins.
But, as with any AI system, the difference between delightful and distracting comes down to tuning, privacy transparency, and, yes, user education. If Moto has the balance right, the Razr 2025 era could see IT teams adopting foldables not just for style, but for substance.
Conclusion: The Era of Smarter Flip Phones Is Upon Us—Ready or Not
Motorola’s audacious reboot of the Razr line isn’t just nostalgia with a party trick. By infusing these foldables with a robust, multi-brand AI ecosystem and pushing core features onto the device, they’ve declared war on the notion that mobile AI must live in the cloud—or behind a paywall. With lucky timing and an uncharacteristic willingness to let users choose their preferred AI buddy, Moto’s playing for both hearts and minds (and maybe a chunk of the IT budget).With that, the question for future-minded users and weary sysadmins alike becomes: Do you trust your pocket companion to keep you ahead, or will all this talk of multi-flavored intelligence fold under real-world pressure? Either way, the 2025 Razr lineup is here to flip the script—one AI-powered glance at a time.
Source: Digital Trends The new Motorola Razr series run Perplexity and CoPilot as part of Moto AI
