Motorola is patching a hole in its US lineup with a non-folding flagship phone, but the pricing puts this device dangerously close to the company’s expensive tablet-style foldable. The long-rumored Motorola Signature 27 is real, featuring top-of-the-line specs, a super-bright OLED screen, and a ton of cameras. But all this high-end hardware won’t come cheap in the age of AI. Motorola’s new flagship smartphone will run a whopping $1,600 when it arrives later this month.

The Signature 27 is a completely new take on flagship smartphones from Motorola, leaving behind the middling legacy of the Edge series. However, you’ll still immediately clock this as a Motorola device due to its distinctive use of materials and Pantone colors. The phone is metal, ceramic, and glass, but the backs are textured polycarbonate. The device comes in Coal Smoke (black) or Capulet Olive (green) colors. The former has a “tactical weave” finish inspired by automotive design, and the latter is “textile-inspired.”

This device will include the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, the most powerful mobile chip Qualcomm offers right now. While some smartphones have flirted with 16GB of memory, that’s less common these days. The Signature 27 will have 12GB like Samsung’s base model flagships. However, there’s not going to be an upgrade option for more. You will, however, get a generous 512GB of storage.

The phone is fairly thin in most places, but it tapers outward near the camera module. It’s easy to see why Moto needed a little more space up there with four image sensors. Note: That’s not four cameras. There are three standard cameras: a 50MP primary, a 50MP ultrawide, and a 200MP 3x optical zoom (100x digital zoom). Joining the cameras is an event-based vision sensor (EVS) to power a feature called Action Shot.

The action sensor measures changes in light at a pixel level, which makes it ideal for tracking moving subjects. Action Shot will turn on automatically when the phone detects a lot of movement in the frame, but you can also activate it manually. Motorola’s cameras have long struggled to capture moving subjects clearly, so it’ll be interesting to see if the EVS fixes that.

The Capulet Olive colorway is supposed to look like fabric, but it’s not.

Credit:
Motorola

If you’ve been thinking about a smaller phone, the Signature 27 isn’t for you. This phone sports a sizable 6.8-inch OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. This is a tandem OLED panel, which uses stacked pixels to increase brightness. Moto claims the Signature 27 can hit an impressive 12,000 nits of peak brightness, which is four times higher than the iPhone 18 Pro Max (and the highest of any smartphone). A possible drawback is that tandem OLEDs tend to have a somewhat uneven appearance at low brightness with solid colors, but we haven’t seen the Signature 27 in person yet to say whether or not that’s the case here.

A display like that could really drain your battery, but the Signature 27 has capacity to spare. The 7,000 mAh silicon-carbon cell is the largest of any mainstream smartphone, 1,000 mAh larger than the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Motorola estimates it could last two days on a charge, and it won’t take long to refill. With a compatible USB-C charger (not included), the Signature 27 can reach speeds up to 90W. Moto claims up to 12 hours of usage in 12 minutes of charging.

You’ve got options

The Motorola Signature 27 will ship with Android 17 and Moto’s Hello UI customizations. The company promises seven years of OS updates, on par with Samsung and Google.