Rethink the cameras… again
It’s not winter, but Motorola’s cameras are like snowflakes — no two are alike. I’m exaggerating just a bit, but only because most of the 2024 lineup has one thing in common — a 50MP primary sensor. Outside of that, the Motorola camera experience is a wild and unpredictable grab bag that doesn’t often scrape the best that budget camera phones have to offer.
I don’t think it’s fair to ask for a flagship-grade camera experience on a budget phone (after all, most of Motorola’s lineup is in the sub-$400 realm), but the Batwing brand needs to find some consistency. Take the Moto G series, for example — all four devices have the same primary camera, but their supporting casts feel like Motorola just reached for whatever was lying around. The lowly Moto G Play offers just one camera (seriously, in 2024), while the Moto G 5G adds a 2MP macro lens that could easily be replaced with extra software and an ultrawide camera. The Moto G Power makes that very swap with an 8MP sensor, only to be outdone by the Moto G Stylus with a sharper 13MP ultrawide.
We capture too many photos and videos to be stuck with cameras this inconsistent.
At least Motorola seems willing to try something new regarding its flagship camera setups. Usually, when we see a pair of cameras, we expect a wide primary sensor and an ultrawide backup, but the new Razr Plus bucks the trend by pairing its wide camera with a telephoto — punching in rather than zooming out. I’m still not sure that it’s the perfect solution, as a phone like the Razr Plus seems better suited to a wider vlog-like camera angle, but it’s proof that Motorola is at least willing to try something different. Maybe the next step is to pair an ultrawide camera with a telephoto sensor and use software to combine the sensors for the equivalent of 1x zoom, like the current ultrawide approach to Macro Vision.
Then again, you might like the current state of Motorola’s cameras. After all, it’s finally bumped up the resolution across the board and seems to be catching up in post-processing, too.
Hello UX, goodbye ads
Where Motorola appears to be falling behind, however, is with its software. Sure, it’s rolled out a shiny new name, transforming My UX into Hello UX, but that was, frankly, the least of Motorola’s concerns.
Instead, partnerships with Glance, 1Weather, and the much-maligned shopping, gaming, and entertainment hubs have turned Motorola’s once-clean software into a bloated, laggy punching bag when I’m having a bad day. I’ve already pointed out in a few reviews how you can liberate yourself from the barrage of ads and unwanted extras, but I can’t wrap my head around Motorola forcing people to opt out rather than opt in. Unless you’re tech-savvy and setting the phone up for yourself, there’s a good chance you’ll wind up with folders designed to weigh down your storage space and a weather forecast that buckles under its own weight.
On top of ditching these bloated partnerships, Motorola needs to give its phones the update support they deserve. The Moto G series is in line for all of one Android version and two years of security patches, and there’s no telling when these updates will come. Even the premium Razr and Razr Plus are only tapped to receive three years of Android updates and a fourth year of security support. That might have flown a few years ago, but it’s far too short now that both Google and Samsung offer seven years of updates. Even if Motorola does upgrade its support, don’t hold your breath for timeliness — the Razr Plus (2023) still hasn’t received Android 14 after nearly a year!
More vegan leather, more fun
Well, now that those less-than-fun suggestions are out of the way, let’s remind Motorola of all the fun it used to have. Remember Moto Mods? They didn’t last all that long, but man, there was a time when you could attach a JBL speaker or a Hasselblad camera to the back of your Moto Z smartphone. You could even add 5G back when it was only available on a street-by-street basis in a few select cities.
On top of Moto Mods, we used to have Moto Maker — a website where you could design and order your own Moto X. I was too young to fully enjoy Moto Maker during its heyday (read: my parents wouldn’t let me buy any of the dozens of Moto X designs I made), but it didn’t stop me from spending hours clicking through different color combinations. Moto Maker was the epitome of the Android motto, “Be together, not the same,” and it’s a little bit of that personality I’d like to see come back.
Moto Maker might not be practical in 2024, but the idea should live on.
Shifting down a level or two, the Moto G series has finally started to have fun with its designs. Moto G 5G and Moto G Power 5G come with vegan leather in 2024, and they look almost good enough to be members of the Edge family. However, there’s one piece of Batwing-branded fun I’m begging to come to the United States — the Nordic Wood version of the Edge 50 Ultra. I’m sure it would be rebranded as the Edge Plus (2024) but think of the heads that a wooden smartphone would turn.
Make the Razr Plus a blueprint, not a standout
So, I’ve put the main pieces of Motorola’s 2024 offerings on blast, but one phone comes close to fixing them all at once — the Razr Plus (2024). No, it’s still not perfect, and this is by no means a review, but if Motorola wants to get back to why people loved it in the first place, its most premium Razr needs to be the rule rather than the exception.
For starters, the Razr Plus went for a camera setup all its own, adopting the 50MP wide and telephoto sensors that I mentioned before. It has an internal 32MP selfie camera, too, but that doesn’t matter much because almost everyone will use the larger, sharper external sensors instead. The Razr Plus comes with the smoothest version of Motorola’s Hello UX, a version that already carries a few of the earliest Moto AI features and — more importantly — comes without 1Weather or Glance anywhere to be found. Even the Razr Plus’ cover screen experience is easily the best on a flip phone, allowing you to open any app at any time and coming with a suite of time-wasting but addictive games.
We don’t need more Razrs, but we need more phones to follow the Razr blueprint.
At the end of the day, the important lesson is that Motorola still has greatness in it. There’s still a little bit of the creative spark that brought us Moto Mods and Moto Maker; the company just has to be willing to spread it beyond the confines of its most premium foldable phone. The sooner it does, the better its chances of climbing back to the top.
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