Motorola Razr 40 review

Displays

The Motorola Razr 40's centerpiece is the large 6.9-inch LTPO AMOLED foldable screen with all sorts of niceties such as 10-bit color depth, 144Hz adaptive refresh rate, up to 360Hz touch response, and HDR10+ support. This appears to be same panel as on the Razr 40 Ultra, but dialed down to from the 165Hz refresh rate.

The foldable screen has an extended 1080p resolution (1,080x2,640 pixels), adding up to 413ppi density. It has a tiny punch hole for the selfie camera and it's covered with a plastic screen protector that you should not peel off to ensure the proper operation of the screen.

The outer display is much smaller than on the 40 Ultra's - it's a 1.5-inch AMOLED piece of 194 x 368 pixels (268ppi), covered by a piece of Gorilla Glass Victus. As you can imagine this screen cannot offer complete Android experience as on the Ultra, it just displays several widgets and can act as a camera viewfinder, too.

The external display is too small to perform our display tests, nor would they make much sense as its quality is far from critical for the operation of the Razr 40. So we jump directly to the large foldable panel.

We recorded a maximum of 505 nits of brightness at point white when manually controlling the brightness from the slider. The screen can go much higher in Auto mode, though, up to 1064 nits when faced with a bright source of light. Those match the measurements we got on the Razr 40 Ultra screen.

The minimum brightness at point white was just 2.9 nits.

Color accuracy

The Motorola Razr 40 has two Color Modes - Saturated targeting the DCI-P3 color space, and Natural - targeting sRGB. There is also a Color Temperature slider for each of these modes.

The Saturated color mode is fairly accurate against DCI-P3 targets (average deltaE of 3.6). The most notable deviations from perfection are the slightly bluish white and gray, and a bit over-saturated green and blue hues. The Natural color mode yields excellent accuracy with sRGB content.

Refresh rate

The Motorola Razr 40 has two Refresh Rate modes - High (up to 144Hz) and Standard (up to 60Hz). Both of those are adaptive and they just differ by the refresh rate cap.

10Hz was the lowest refresh rate we observed on the Motorola Razr 40 and it is used for idle screen in UI, system and third-party apps. Sometimes the UI uses 90Hz instead of 10Hz, though.

The Motorola Razr 40 went with 24Hz for various video playback scenarios, streaming included. We also observed 30Hz and 50Hz, when playing YouTube content.

Then 60Hz was the norm everywhere when using the Standard mode, and across HFR incompatible apps such as the Camera app and Google Maps.

In High mode, 90Hz and 120Hz were used somewhat randomly pretty much everywhere across HFR-compatible apps and system interfaces.

Indeed, we did not observe 144Hz even once, just like we didn't see 165Hz or 144Hz on the Razr 40 Ultra. We could force 144Hz from the Game Sidebar, but seeing how the games don't support it we didn't see any point in that.

The external display is locked at 60Hz refresh rate.

Display options

Streaming and HDR

The Motorola Razr 40 has Widevine L1 DRM support and is officially HDR10+ certified. All apps but Netflix recognized the screen as HDR10-capable and pushed 1080p HDR10 streaming. Hopefully Netflix and Motorola will rectify this quickly.

Battery life

The Motorola Razr 40 has a 4,200mAh battery, up from 3,800mAh cell inside the Ultra.

The Razr 40 scored a total endurance rating of 85 hours, which is lower than we hoped, but there's more to the story. The phone did very well across most tests - it lasted nearly a day on voice calls, over 14 hours on web browsing and over 14 hours on local video playback. What brought the overall score down was standby performance - just like it was on the Ultra (about 200 hours).

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

And here you can compare the Motorola Razr 40 with some competitors.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage patterns check out our all-time battery test results chart where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging speed

The Motorola Razr 40 supports 30W TurboPower wired charging, just like the Ultra. It ships with a 33W power adapter and a USB-C-to-A cable in the box.

Five minutes on that charger gave us 12% of charge, 15 mins - 31%, 30 mins - 57%. A full charge 0% to 100% required 61 minutes - not the best numbers around, but certainly among the better in the foldable game.

The Razr 40 also beat the Razr 40 Ultra with its smaller battery capacity and identical power adapter. The extra screen of the Ultra is clearly being detrimental to heat dissipation.

The Motorola Razr 40 also supports 5W wireless charging, in case you have a Qi-compatible pad in your car or on your desk.

Optimized Battery Charging option is available, too. If enabled, the phone will learn your charging habits and will recharge the last 20% of the battery just before you unplug it. This is particularly helpful if you recharge your phone overnight.

There is also overcharge protection, which will stop charging the phone if it has been plugged in continuously for more than 3 days.

Speakers

The Motorola Razr 40 features two stereo speakers - the earpiece acting as the second one, alongside the primary speaker near the USB-C port at the bottom.

Naturally, this represents a hybrid setup, where the bottom speaker is louder with more bass and mids, while the top one focuses mostly on high frequencies and is overall quieter. The earpiece is pointed at 45 degrees or so, which makes for some decent audio balance and we had some very good experience with the speakers and multimedia.

Even better, they scored a Very Good mark on our loudness test and we heard good vocals, high frequencies and even some bass.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.