Dream Phone Became a Nightmare

I have never been as disappointed and angry about a product at I am about my Motorola Razr. I’ve been a Motorola fan for 20 years and I honestly thought I’d finally bought my dream phone, which has turned into an absolute nightmare.

My first Motorola Razr was the V3 Pink. Almost everything I own is black, but I loved that pink phone with a passion. I was absolutely gutted when it developed an irreparable software issue and I had to say a tearful goodbye. I then moved onto the beautiful gunmetal grey V3 Razr and loved that phone just as much as my pink princess. I had it for years and only stopped using it because I eventually had to join the world of smartphones. A world that I thought was silly because there were no flip phones and what is better than a flip phone?!

Fast forward to late 2016/early 2017, when my brother, knowing how much I loved my Motorola Razrs, sent me a link to a concept video promising that a modern-day Motorola Razr smartphone with a foldable touchscreen was being developed. It sounded like an absolute sci-fi fantasy! A flip phone with a touchscreen? How could a touchscreen fold?! I told him that I’d believe it when I saw it, but in my heart I knew that if anyone could do it, it would be Motorola.

Time travel another few years into the future and, sure enough, Motorola releases it’s stunning new touchscreen Razr. I was so excited, and so disappointed – it was gorgeous, but there was absolutely no way that I could afford the very hefty price tag attached. I live in a third world country and am not a wealthy person. Not a doctor or lawyer or any such profession. Just a smalltown girl, trying to eke out a living in the face of a great many challenges, with no help or support. I normally don’t care what phone I have and have never had a high-end luxury phone, but the nostalgia of the Motorola Razr called me loudly. Despite being saddened that I would probably never actually my dream phone, I was pleased to see it come into existence.

As we all know, the first gen model had a lot of issues, with virtually every aspect of the phone. Still, I didn’t lose faith in my beloved Motorola. Naturally there would be teething problems with something so innovative, there always are. But I trusted Motorola to overcome them. Which they seemed to have done when the next gen was released. And that is the true test of company in that situation – how well they listen to users and implement their feedback to improve the product.

Another leap forward in time to 2021. The 2020 Razr seemed to have all the niggles sorted out and the stars appeared to have aligned to make a happy little dream come true for me. I’d been so fortunate to be a part of a really big project (the biggest I’d worked on since going freelance in 2019) and my earnings were such that I could afford to spoil myself with a little something nice. I decided to invest that treat money in a new phone. For the past several years I’d had an extremely cheap phone that regularly dropped pieces of itself off if I even looked it at wrong. I had, quite literally, superglued it back together more times than I care to remember. It is quite a testament to that brand really, that the phone still functioned at all with several of its parts held together by glue and tape. Although I am not materialistic, having a reliable and always-working phone is actually quite important to my life. I live in a very rural area and my phone is my only means of contacting security if I need help, like when I experienced the terror of a home invasion. Out here, no one can hear you scream. So, it was partly a responsible decision to replace my phone that was already on borrowed time. It had not occurred to me that I would actually be able to afford the beautiful Motorola Razr, even with my treat money, but thanks to an epic Black Friday special on Amazon, I managed to sc**** together enough to order my dream phone! I was so excited! Things like that don’t happen to me often and I was bursting out of my skin with gratitude and anticipation.

It arrived about two weeks before Christmas (shipping to my country takes a while) and I made myself save it to double as my Christmas gift. I don’t really have family so there isn’t usually anything under the tree unless I buy a little something for myself to add to the gifts that I buy for my furbabies. And that year, for the first time in decades, I was excited for Christmas! Opening and setting up my stunning Motorola Razr symbolized all the hard work I’d put into my career for so many very long years. I have made so many sacrifices to survive and barely ever had the opportunity to truly spoil myself. This phone was a symbol of so much for me and I loved it from the moment I opened the box. I couldn’t believe I was lucky enough to actually buy my dream phone!

But the dream very quickly became a nightmare. Within just a couple of months the screen started displaying signs of wearing through the surface. Very obvious marks where most screen actions were made. Like the top layer of the screen was rubbing off. I tried to contact Motorola (Amazon said it was a supplier issue and they couldn’t help) but they shrugged me off and said it was nothing to worry about and would even back out over time. I trusted them and believed them. Then the ghost touches started. I need to be very clear about something here – I am a VERY careful person and I take excellent care of everything I have. Being mostly poor, I cannot afford to replace things so I make very sure to handle and use everything with extreme care so that they last. I have never dropped this phone, never knocked it, never exposed it to moisture, never put it in a pocket or handbag without being in a well-padded protection pouch, never lent it to anyone, never let a child touch it, barely ever even take it anywhere. 98% of the time it is on a side table or my desk in my home office. I don’t have a ton of time to spend on my phone so it doesn’t even get used as much as some other people’s phones. And because this particular phone is so special to me, I have treated it like it is made of crystal. So the ghost touches are not due to any misuse of the phone. I tried to report that issue to Motorola too, but again had my concerns dismissed.

Over the next year or two I had various issues with the phone. The ghost touches became more frequent and caused a lot of problems like making unintended calls, closing apps while I was using them, prematurely sending messages, and even deleting things from my phone. Yet every time I tried to get help from Motorola, I was given the cold shoulder. I absolutely couldn’t afford to replace the phone at my own cost and my insurance refused because it was still under warranty with Motorola. Then came more issues. The phone switching off for no reason. Opening the phone and the screen remained off. Having to open and close the flip several times before the screen registered the action and came on. The screen locking and unlocking on its own. The phone crashing for no reason. The phone and/or screen freezing. The screen sticking. The screen lagging. Touches registering on the wrong part of the screen. The screen beginning to feel bumpy. A slight darkening of the screen across the hinge area. The adaptive brightness becoming faulty so that it darkened the screen randomly without a change in the external light source. The gestures becoming hit or miss. Needing to lock and unlock the phone several times each time I tried to use it to “reset” some of the issues, like the many, many, many screen problems.

Then, last year, in June 2024, the rear (external) camera stopped functioning. No warning, no signs of anything coming, no indication it was beginning to fail, just out of the blue stopped working. When that happened, I hoped that Motorola would finally do something because it was a clear hardware issue and surely the warranty must now be honoured?! Nope. Why? Because by then, all the service centres in my country had been dropped by Motorola. You read that right, all support for Motorola products had been withdrawn from my entire country and no warranties (extended or otherwise) were being honoured. Motorola had just completely turned its back on my whole country. I begged them to help, literally begged. They ignored me. The money I used to buy the phone was good enough for them, but the human behind it was treated like a worthless piece of nothing. In my desperation, I contacted every single one of the service centres that used to attend to Motorola repairs in my country in an attempt to find someone who might be able to repair my ever-worsening phone at a cost that I could try to afford. I received the same response from each one that rep**** – We will not touch Motorola products, not even for cash up front. It felt distinctly like they knew something more than consumers.

Since I could not afford to replace the phone and no one was willing to repair it, even at my own cost, I had no choice but to continue trying to live with it. Have you ever tried taking all photos using just the internal “selfie” camera? It doesn’t zoom and you can’t see what’s happening on the screen when taking the photo or video, which led to so many precious memories of my cats and the lovely wildlife around me not being captured. I tried to see it as being forced to “live in the moment” but cats are not immortal and the day comes when photos and videos are all you have left of them – as has happened with one of my beloved babies just last week. The issues all got worse and it reached the stage where I had begun to hate using my phones on the days it was acting up the most. Some days I just switch it off entirely and put it away in a cupboard because it becomes genuinely depressing to struggle so much with this incredibly expensive, “luxury”, “high-end”, phone that I worked so extremely hard to afford. It’s frustrating to try use and upsetting to be so badly treated by Motorola after being such a loyal fan for two decades.

Today (16 July 2025) was the final straw. The screen was behaving so badly that I couldn’t even finish reading one text message that required an urgent reply. Rampant ghost touches, freezing every few seconds, going dark without warning (despite adaptive brightness being turned off long ago), sticking, etc. I restarted the phone because locking and unlocking wasn’t helping at all. Barely made any difference. Eventually I gave up and left it for a time. When I opened my phone to try again, the screen made the most awful crunching, crackling sound. Like a foil potato chip packet being crumpled up when empty. And instead of the screen coming on, it began flickering and flashing in green. I am no phone technician, but that is obviously an indication of a massive problem. I immediately turned the phone off and on again, hoping it was a temporary problem. But it still flickered green with almost none of the home screen visible at all. I switched it off again and left it for a while. When I opened my phone to turn it on again, the entire top half of the screen just detached from the phone and flopped loose, from above the hinge area, and the bottom half, below the hinge area, went completely black. No more green flickering, just an entirely dead screen with half of it flapping free from the phone body. I tried to press the screen back to where it is supposed to be attached, but it is useless and pointless. The external screen still works, but it has such limited functionality that it doesn’t help much, and I certainly didn’t spend my one-time treat money on an expensive luxury phone to have a miniscule screen, no camera, minimal functionality, inability to access numerous apps, no access to Settings at all, and the now-constant fear that my phone will stop working entirely when I cannot afford a new one.

I am bitterly disappointed in Motorola, disgusted by how they treat their customers and loyal supporters, and appalled at the utterly ********** quality of their very expensive phones. I wish that I could go back in time and choose the Samsung flip phone instead of supporting this terrible company that should be ashamed of itself on every level. This dream turned nightmare has made sure that I’ll never buy another Motorola phone ever again, and the non-existent support from Motorola ensures that I will warn as many people as possible to not buy their products. Everything about this experience has been inexcusable and Motorola clearly does not care at all about product quality or its customers.