At CES 2026, among the AI humanoids, flashy concepts and next-gen foldables, was a Motorola phone that could be the flagship device fans have been waiting for. While the Motorola Razr Fold was the talk of the town (after all, it is the company's first-ever book-style foldable), there's a premium smartphone with top specs and a sophisticated design: the Motorola Signature.
Recent high-end Motorola phones have had good-looking hardware but have fallen short in one or more areas, including display, performance, cameras, software or battery. The Motorola Signature is the first flagship phone from the company that looks confident enough to take on heavyweights like the Galaxy S26 Plus and iPhone 17, without faltering on either hardware or software. It appears to be a phone with no major downsides, at least on paper.
I went hands-on with the Motorola Signature, which I found to be a breath of fresh air. I can admit I'm finally excited about a Motorola phone that's not a Razr.
Motorola Signature is lightweight, slim and rugged
The Motorola Signature has a big and bright display. Prakhar Khanna/CNET
The Motorola Signature has a 6.8-inch AMOLED display with a 1,264x2,780-pixel resolution and supports a 165Hz refresh rate. It's an LTPO panel, so it can be set to 1Hz for an always-on display, thereby saving battery life. The screen is rated to deliver 6,200 nits of peak brightness for supported HDR content. Its resolution might not be as sharp as the Galaxy S25 Ultra, but it's a promising screen for gaming and content consumption.
On the back, you get three cameras: a 50-megapixel main camera with OIS, paired with a 50-megapixel telephoto camera with a 3x zoom lens and OIS, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera. These are the same cameras you'll find on the upcoming Razr Fold. Sony is behind all of the optics, which I expect will help these Motorola cameras be a significant upgrade over the current-generation phones.
The Signature features a 5,200-mAh silicon-carbon battery, supporting 90-watt wired charging and 50-watt wireless charging. Should those speeds hold up, that battery might fill up quickly using either method.
Both black and olive variants have the same linen finish, which feels nice to touch. Prakhar Khanna/CNET
Motorola's new phone won't be as powerful as the OnePlus 15, but it should hold its place in the flagship category. It's powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset (which sits below the 8 Elite Gen 5) and is paired with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Although it's not the highest-end chip available, this one will likely still pack plenty of power, putting it in the range of last year's high-end phones, such as the OnePlus 13 and Galaxy S25 Ultra.
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