2026 is shaping up to be a tough year to launch a high-end phone. The memory crisis has phone prices rising across the board, so an already expensive phone risks becoming a much too expensive phone. That might be what happened to the Razr Fold, which will cost $1,900 when it goes on sale in the US on May 14th. That doesn’t include the Moto Pen Ultra stylus, which costs an additional $100.

Motorola has dripped out some of the Fold’s specs since it was first previewed at CES, and those early signs indicated that this device wouldn’t be the more affordable folding phone the market so desperately needs. Today’s announcement confirms that: it’ll slot in right between the $1,800 Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold and the $2,000 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7.

That puts the Razr Fold in a slightly awkward spot. It’s noticeably thinner and lighter than the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, but lacks the Pixel’s full dust resistance. The Razr is IP48/IP49 rated, so it’s only rated against “small particles.” The Galaxy Z Fold 7 isn’t dust-resistant either, but it’s a bit slimmer than the Razr.

There’s one potential saving grace: a 6,000mAh silicon-carbon battery, giving it a significantly higher capacity than either of the other two devices. Battery life on the Fold 7 and 10 Pro Fold is fine, not great, and the Razr Fold’s could be amazing. That wouldn’t be a first for a book-style foldable, but it would be a first for one sold in North America.

I’ve seen the Razr Fold a few times in the flesh at this point, so it’s good to finally know how much this phone will cost. But now I have more questions: Does it deliver on the promise of better battery life? For nineteen hundred US dollars? In this economy? Motorola is sure hoping so.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

The 2026 edition of Motorola’s stylus phone is plenty appealing.

My review unit is a charming lilac color, has a pleasantly textured back panel, and includes a MicroSD slot and what might be the last surviving headphone jack on a mainstream phone sold in North America. The namesake stylus is no longer just a fancy plastic stick, it’s active and comes with some neat tricks. 

Motorola Moto G Stylus (2026)

The latest version of Motorola’s stylus phone comes with an active pen, as well as old favorites like a headphone jack and MicroSD support.

Score: 6

Pros	Cons
Active stylus Headphone jack! MicroSD card support! IP68/69 rated Big screen for the people who love big screens	Improved but still present bloatware situation Processor is a touch laggy Photo processing isn’t great Feels about $100 too expensive

Where to Buy:

• $499.99 at Motorola
• $499.99 at Amazon
• $499.99 at Best Buy

Even the bloatware problem has been reined in. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still present. But the unwanted apps have been scaled back to a manageable level compared to a couple of years ago. There’s just one pre-downloaded app “folder” that’s actually an app rather than three. The full page MotoHub widget, which was a privacy nightmare, is gone. The third-party weather app is now clearly identified as “developed by OneLouder Apps” on the initial splash page — something I complained about in my last Stylus review in 2023. If an app is going to ask to track your location constantly, you should at least be able to understand who made it without doing 10 minutes of googling. 

The fact that bloatware is no longer my top concern with the G Stylus is a major improvement. But the phone comes with a higher price tag this year: $499, a full $100 price increase year over year. I’m sure the memory crisis has something to do with that. But it puts the Stylus squarely in the midrange, and I’m not convinced that it performs like a midrange phone should.

I don’t want to sell the G Stylus short. The active stylus is lovely to use, and there’s nothing quite like it in any other budget or midrange phone. It’s pressure sensitive, does a reasonably good job of handwriting recognition, and you can even configure it to magnify text when you hover over it. I have a feeling that’s a feature I’m going to really appreciate in a few years.

The notes app comes with the option to organize your notes into collections, which makes it feel less like a dumping ground and more like a tidy home for all the random stuff I stumble on and want to remember. The stylus is thoughtfully developed and integrated, and I think it even rivals the much pricier Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s stylus experience.

But the Moto G Stylus stumbles on a couple of basics, one being photos. The main camera is fine; it’s a 50-megapixel sensor with an optically stabilized lens. It does a good enough job in daylight, although colors are very punchy and red-channel clipping can cause some unpleasant color shifts. It gives a certain artificial look to photos. The ultrawide is fine, and it doubles as a macro camera so it provides autofocus for close-up shots. That means you get shots you might actually want to use compared to the days of the crappy 5-megapixel dedicated macro camera.

Here’s the thing: there are four camera lens-looking things on the back of the phone, one of which houses the flash. There are only two rear cameras available in the camera app. What gives? The spec sheet claims the last one is a “3-in-1 light sensor.” Motorola spokesperson Brendan Hall says it “helps with Auto White Balance, Exposure, and Anti-Flicker.” Which, I guess. But no doubt at least part of its job is to look like a real, third camera lens, and that feels like kind of a cheap trick. 

The Moto G Stylus offers robust water and dust resistance: both IP68 and IP69, so it can stand up to water immersion and high pressure spray. This is excellent news. But software support doesn’t look as good: only two major OS upgrades and three years of security updates offered,  and Motorola has a reputation for delivering those pretty slowly. 

The Stylus 2026’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 chipset coupled with 8GB of RAM feels like just enough power for this device. I noticed very slight hesitations here and there, particularly after waking it and opening a new app. Granted, I’ve been using flagship phones for most of the last year, but it’s been a long time since I’ve consciously noticed any kind of lag running my day-t0-day apps. It’s not enough to be a real concern today, but this is also the fastest the phone is ever going to run. It’ll hold up for its two scheduled annual OS upgrades, but I do worry about it slowing down after that.

I appreciate the Moto G Stylus. I love that it offers something truly different from the competition — the active stylus, a sense of style, not to mention the headphone jack and microSD slot. There’s bloatware, but not as bad as before. I just wish the cameras were a little better and it came with more software updates so I could recommend it as easily as the undefeated midrange champ: the Google Pixel 10A. 

At a significant discount, the Moto G Stylus becomes a more interesting value proposition. Prior to RAMageddon, I would have said Motorola was sure to offer some good discounts on it before too long. Now I’m not so sure. Bottom line, if you want to hold onto your phone as long as possible and you take a lot of photos, you should stick with the Pixel. 

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

I’ve never been as charmed and frustrated by one gadget as I have with the Poetry Camera.

It’s a delightful object. White and cherry red with a color-matched woven strap, it looks playful and adorably lo-fi. If I saw it on a store shelf, I’d absolutely pick it up. 

But aside from obviously appealing, I’m not exactly sure what it is. I mean, I know what it is. It’s a camera that makes AI poems instead of photos. You take a picture, and instead of printing a photo, you get an AI-generated poem inspired by the scene, printed on thermal receipt paper. But after printing dozens of poems, I can only report feeling frustrated instead of inspired.

There’s no screen on the camera itself, just a shutter button and a dial that lets you pick a different poem style. It only works when connected to a Wi-Fi network, relaying your image and a prompt tied to the camera setting you’ve chosen to the cloud. About 30 seconds later, the printer spits out a poem. Tear it off like you would a grocery store receipt, read it to your friends/spouse/cat, rinse and repeat. The poems themselves all sound a bit like this one, inspired by a picture I took in my kitchen:

Fingers curve the mug-
white cabinets hold their
secret:
another April

The Poetry Camera is the product of a collaboration between Kelin Carolyn Zhang, an ex-Twitter designer, and Ryan Mather, an ex-Googler. They brought the concept to life through painstaking iteration, taking it from a wacky idea to a cardboard prototype to a functional product. They gave a thoughtful presentation at Figma’s annual conference last year about the highs and lows of their collaborative relationship; later in 2025, they parted ways. Zhang oversaw production of Poetry Camera’s Batch 2, assembled at a factory in Shenzhen as part of a residency with MIT rather than manually with the help of friends in New York. The second round of cameras went on sale for half its original price: $349 rather than $699. That batch is sold out; a third batch is promised for May.

The mechanics of the Poetry Camera are nifty. How do you get a gadget without a screen or a mobile app connected to Wi-Fi? You use Poetry Camera’s simple web app to generate a QR code. Point the camera at the code and it’ll link up automatically. Clever. There’s an LED around the shutter that communicates connection status or problems, and the printer also spits out a message to let you know when it’s online. There’s something about a gadget communicating with its user with a physical, printed message that’s sort of cute.

You can also access a portal for your particular camera where you can customize the prompts for each poem setting. That got me really interested. Poetry is great and all, but the sonnets and haikus about the line of shoes in my entry got old pretty fast. 

Rewriting the prompts sounded fun. I learned that you have to actively instruct it not to write a poem, even with an entirely new prompt that doesn’t mention poetry. But once I’d done that, I successfully created a mode that prints an appropriate quote from Jurassic Park based on what it identifies in a scene. Another mode describes the current weather conditions when I take a picture out the window and gives me a forecast for the day. But not all of my prompts worked, and the trial-and-error process of figuring out why became tedious. 

The camera puts itself to sleep after a couple of minutes, and when it does, you need to start it up again and wait for it to reconnect to the network. When it fails, the camera prints out one of a handful of error messages, styled as a poem. This was cute the first time it happened, but it wore thin after a half-dozen attempts. It also means you don’t know exactly what the problem was — did my prompt hit some guardrails? Was I standing too far from the Wi-Fi router? Related: I couldn’t get the camera to connect to my iPhone’s hotspot no matter what I tried, so my experimentation was bound to the house.

I have no doubt that Poetry Camera is the product of talented, dedicated minds. But it feels to me like an artifact of AI as we knew it years ago when we were all first delighted by ChatGPT — when an LLM writing something that looks like a poem was a novelty and we were all a little less weary of chatbots.  

Call me old-fashioned, but I think the value in an art form like poetry is directly tied to the humanity of its creator. I tried to set this aside and accept the Poetry Camera free of bias, but maybe I was just never going to have a good time with it. The Poetry Camera puts together words that kind of sound deep and meaningful on the surface, but also feel soulless and read like empty calories. AI can be a powerful tool in making software, but writing meaningful poetry requires, at a bare minimum, a soul. A computer doesn’t have one of those, no matter what venture capitalists may say otherwise. 

I’m still not sure what Poetry Camera is, but  I do know one thing: it’s not for me.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Upgrading your phone with a camera grip attachment is one thing. But doll-sized telephoto lenses that you mount on top of the rear camera? C’mon.

I wrote the Vivo X300 off as a gimmick, a funny concept designed to generate attention rather than actual sales. But then I spent a weekend carrying the phone and its elaborate kit of goofy little lenses around — and I had way too much fun.

The Vivo X300 Ultra is an update to one of the very best phone cameras out there. It’s only available in China at the moment, with a global launch that will almost certainly exclude the US. Its rear cameras are no joke: a 200-megapixel main, 200-megapixel 3.7x telephoto, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide. Vivo sells a pro camera grip separately to add a physical shutter button. And if you want to really go for it there are those two telephoto extender lenses, each of which mounts to a special plate putting it in front of the telephoto camera. This year’s edition features a more compact version of last year’s 2.35x adapter, adding up to a 200mm equivalent, as well as a new 400mm option. 

If you’re going to carry a phone like the X300 Ultra, you might as well go all in. I stopped short of using the dedicated bag that Vivo sent alongside my review unit — partially because it smells weird, but also because I needed something bigger for a full day out at the spring fair. But I attached the special camera kit case to the phone, along with the pro camera grip, the telephoto lens adapter plate, and a crossbody strap ripped straight out of Apple’s fall 2025 catalog. I stepped out of the family SUV with 150mg of non-drowsy Allegra coursing through my veins, camera slung across my chest and a suitably ergonomic backpack on my shoulders. Peak parent mode.

I took a few shots around the midway without the attachment lenses, but once we headed for the kiddie roller coaster, I knew it was time. I popped the 200mm extender on and didn’t take it off for at least another three hours. Did I look like a weirdo? Yeah. But I was having too much fun to care. 

It took a minute to wrap my head around using a 200mm lens on a smartphone camera. I remembered that I had to care about shutter speed. But once I got the hang of it I couldn’t believe what I was getting away with. Depth! Layers! An optical telephoto lens lets you play with composition in a way that never quite translates with digital zoom. I was taking shots I’d never even attempt with another phone camera, and it was mostly working out. 

I figured I’d put the extender lens on the phone, take a few photos, and then remove it until I needed it again, but that’s enough of a hassle that I just left it alone. Anyway, once I started realizing all of the potential for telephoto photos, that’s all I wanted to shoot.

It did mean that the lens kept banging against the carnival ride seats every time I bent over to buckle my kid into a sparkling rocket ship or whatever, but this didn’t seem to do any damage to the camera equipment. Guess I have that sturdy Zeiss construction to thank.

A kid on a roller coaster coming straight toward the camera was still tricky for the autofocus system, and I missed plenty of shots. But that would be a challenging scenario for a camera of any size, and once I shifted to a more forgiving composition it started to click. And it took me a minute to realize that half-pressing the camera grip’s shutter button was only locking focus and exposure, not acquiring focus — because it is a smartphone, the camera is just doing that all the time on its own. But once I got comfortable mashing the shutter button all the way and trusting that auto-focus was working, I started really having some fun. This was also around the time that the demolition derby started.

On our way to our seats we passed a sign prohibiting professional photo and video capture, including cameras with “removable lenses.” I had the X300 Ultra over my shoulder with its 200mm extender attached, but nobody batted an eye. I’m not usually one to use manual exposure controls on a phone, but I definitely needed them as the cars started crashing and the early evening light faded. 

I switched from the 200mm to the 400mm, and back again when the light became too dim. From my spot about halfway up the stands, 200mm wasn’t quite long enough and 400mm was a little too close. There’s the option to use digital zoom on top of the teleconverter’s optical magnification, but I opted to stick with native focal lengths as a matter of principle. 

I managed to get some shots I really like with each of the extenders — plenty of detail on the cars that we couldn’t see from the stands, the focus on the drivers’ faces as they chased down another car. Side note: Cars crashing into each other rules. I kept shooting until the light was too dim and detail really started to suffer. The antihistamines had worn off and the preschoolers were restless, so we called it a night.

Whenever I get my hands on a telephoto lens I remember how much fun it is. Having that experience while using a smartphone was totally unexpected. There’s nothing stopping me from renting a telephoto lens for my Sony a7c to bring to the fair, and I probably would have gotten more of those roller coaster photos in focus.

But it would likely have caught security’s attention at the demo derby, and definitely would have put more of a strain on my aching back and shoulders with the added weight. The 200mm lens attachment is small and light enough I would barely notice its presence in my purse, and I could definitely see taking it along on another family outing.

I’m frankly surprised at how fast I went from dismissing the whole extender lens concept as a silly idea to wanting the big phone brands that sell in the US to adopt something similar, like, yesterday. Where is Samsung on this? Why can’t I buy a funny little lens for the Galaxy S26 Ultra? Consider me an extender lens convert.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

I saw a lot of weird phones at Mobile World Congress last month: robot phones, cameras disguised as phones, phones for dogs. But the one that caught me most off guard was the one my friend (and Verge alum) Sam Byford brought to dinner: an iPhone Air.

“Ha!” I said. “You actually use that thing?” 

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s great.” That’s when he pulled out a second phone — the Xiaomi Leica Leitzphone, which he was using alongside it. 

Got it, I said. The trick to enjoying the iPhone Air is to simply have another, much better phone on your person at all times. I found this very funny and recounted the anecdote to anyone who would listen. But friends, I come to you with a confession. I think Sam is right: The iPhone Air might actually be good.

In fairness, I never really thought it was bad bad. I gave it a 7 when I reviewed it last year. The benefits of its slim profile and light weight are easy to understand, and it really does leave an impression when you hold it for yourself. But a phone with worse battery life, a single rear camera, and one measly speaker? For the same price as a regular phone? I kind of wrote it off as a weird thing that happened on the way to the Apple folding phone.

I picked up my iPhone Air review unit again after MWC when I needed to compare its camera to the 17E’s. After the 17E review, I swapped my eSIM to the Air to see if using it for a longer period of time told me anything new. I figured I’d get tired of it after a week or so, but I didn’t. I kinda got hooked.

It helps that I’m not doing any traveling right now, and I’m very rarely away from a charger for an extended period of time. My soft-pants, remote-work lifestyle is very forgiving to a phone with weak battery life. Even so, it lasted through a lengthy excursion out of the house last week. I definitely plugged it in for a recharge when I got back home, since battery percentage was hovering just above 20 percent and I’m allergic to low power mode. 

It’s no accident at all that when Apple loaned me the Air to review it also sent the super-slim MagSafe battery pack to go with it. I’ve been putting it to use while I revisit the Air, and not only as an insurance policy when I go out; sometimes it’s nice to have so I can top off the battery while I’m using it around the house without having to tether myself to a wall charger. That got me thinking: Maybe MagSafe is the thing here.

One of my own personal hang-ups with the Air is its screen size. It’s a slim phone, not a small phone, and I still find it a pain to use one-handed. But what if I just pop on a magnetic ring grip when I’m settling in to do some real scrolling? I started leaving one on a side table next to the couch to have it handy for such occasions. When I’m done it comes off the phone; the Air stays just as light and pocketable as ever.

I also started using a MagSafe wallet with the Air. I like the idea of a wallet on the back of my phone, but I usually find them too bulky, even without a case on whatever phone I’m using. But since the Air is so slim to start with, I don’t mind the added bulk of the wallet. It’s a pretty handy way to carry a couple of essential cards when I’m running out of the house for a quick errand, and when I’m back home I can just plop it onto the key tray. 

You could even use MagSafe as a solution for one of the Air’s other weak points: the crummy speaker. I mean, AirPods exist, for starters, which is usually good enough for me. But if you really wanted to go in on the modularity aspect, you could pick up a MagSafe Bluetooth speaker to thwack onto the back. Suddenly, this isn’t just the weird skinny iPhone with the bad battery anymore. It’s a modular phone.

I think the toughest thing to overcome on the iPhone Air is its camera. Unless Apple plans to release a Vivo-style camera lens system that can transform the Air’s rear camera into an actual telephoto when you need it, you’re stuck with a basically fine wide-angle lens and a little 2x crop zoom in a pinch. But more people these days are fine carrying a point-and-shoot camera in addition to their phone anyway. So if you were never very fond of the iPhone camera look, maybe the Air can be your excuse to bring a dedicated camera more often. Personally, I find the built-in camera options good enough that I just put up with it. But I’d be seriously tempted to try adding an ultrawide adapter if I was going to extend this experiment any longer.

I still think that the iPhone Air is impractical for most people. You know, people who don’t carry two phones, or get excited when they hear the words “Moto Mods.” The battery is only going to get worse over time, and maybe the modularity theory would start to get old after a year of managing a small stable of accessories. I can see the novelty wearing off. As for me, my time with the Air is over for now and I’m back on the 17 Pro. Is it nice having three actual rear cameras to choose from? And not worrying about the battery lasting a full day? It is. But I miss the iPhone Air more than I thought I would. And if it does end up being a weird side quest on the way to a folding iPhone, then at least it was an entertaining one.

The Selfix phone case is a classic example of a great idea in theory that falls apart in practice.

It’s a case for the iPhone 17 Pro with a circular screen on the back. It mirrors the middle of your main phone screen, making it easier to frame up selfies using your phone’s higher-quality rear cameras rather than the selfie camera. A nice concept! I wish it worked better.

Selfie cameras have come a long way, and the updated sensor in the iPhone 17 series’ front-facing camera is more than capable in good lighting. But there are still ways that the bigger sensors and lenses in your phone’s rear cameras outperform them: They can do slow-motion video, better low-light images, and more convincing portrait mode photos. The Selfix case makes all of that possible — if you can put up with it for long enough.

Dockcase Selfix

The Selfix is a case for the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max that includes a built-in screen for rear-camera selfies. It’s a nice idea that doesn’t quite work in practice.

Where to Buy:

• $79 at Kickstarter

The Selfix case is on preorder now through Kickstarter, with a full retail price of $129 and pricing for backers listed at $79. But I have some real hesitations recommending it even at the discounted early bird rate. For starters, it’s bulky. I’m working very hard here to overcome my biases: I don’t usually use cases, and I’m fresh from a couple weeks of using the iPhone Air. This case on the iPhone 17 Pro was always going to feel unwieldy to me. Still: I think it is unreasonably big. You do get a built-in microSD card slot, which is nice. It meets the UHS-I, Class 10, U3, and V30 standards, meaning that you should be able to record 4K video directly to the card without dropping frames provided that you have a fast enough card.

My biggest complaint with the Selfix is that it just doesn’t do the job very well. The screen is a circle with a 1.6-inch diameter, so it naturally cuts off a big chunk of the rectangular preview image on your main phone screen. It also has some real chunky bezels, so the usable screen area is a little smaller than the inside of a paper towel tube. All of that means there’s still some guesswork involved; if you frame your face in the center of the rear screen you’ll get a selfie with a lot of blank space above your head.

The Selfix’s screen is touch-sensitive, but I couldn’t get tap-to-focus to work consistently. The unit I tested is labeled as “Beta,” which may be the culprit here. You need to use the volume keys on your iPhone to take a photo or start video recording anyway, because the part of the screen with the virtual shutter button is cut off. It’s also kind of unsettling shooting video and not seeing any indication that recording has started. For something that’s designed to reduce the guesswork of using the rear cameras, there’s an awful lot of guesswork still involved.

Then there are the side effects. The case allows for passthrough wired charging, but no data connections, meaning no wired CarPlay or transferring files to your laptop over USB. There’s a magnetic ring in the back of the case so you can keep using MagSafe accessories, but no wireless charging. You need to take the case off to do any of these things. 

On top of all that, it’s pretty easy to forget the rear screen is turned on when you’re done taking your selfies. As a reminder: It mirrors whatever is on your phone screen, so you could wind up giving the rest of the world a clear view of your banking app or whatever you’re looking at. There’s a dedicated button on the side of the case to turn the screen on and off, and when it turns on you’ll see a little USB plug icon in the Dynamic Island to let you know an accessory has been plugged in. But there’s no persistent onscreen reminder that the case is mirroring the display, and I can see that going wrong in some unfortunate ways.

Look, I love a weird phone accessory. And I appreciate the Selfix case trying to do more than one thing — help you use the rear cameras for selfies, expand your phone storage, and protect your device. I just wish it did its main job better.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge