The Motorola Signature is a stunning, rugged Samsung Galaxy S25 rival with one unfortunate weakness

• Motorola has announced the Motorola Signature
• This flagship phone is priced between the Samsung Galaxy S25 and the Galaxy S25 Plus
• It has an assortment of high-end specs, but its chipset is disappointing

In recent years if you’ve wanted a truly high-end Motorola phone, your choices have been limited to foldables, but now the company is back with a flagship non-foldable phone, dubbed the Motorola Signature.

This handset is the first in a new series, and it has a lot going for it, including four 50MP cameras (a wide, ultra-wide, front-facing, and a telephoto offering 3x optical zoom). It also has a 6.8-inch 1264 x 2780 AMOLED screen with a 165Hz refresh rate and up to 6,200 nits of brightness, with those last two specs being higher than you’ll find on most phones.

Plus it has a 5,200mAh battery with 90W wired charging and 50W wireless charging, 512GB of storage, 12GB of RAM, and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset.

For the most part, those specs match or beat even the priciest of rivals, and there’s more here too, with this having a stylish, premium design and being slim at 6.99mm thick, yet very durable, thanks to both IP68 and IP69 dust and water resistance ratings, along with Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protection and military-grade durability.

Not the top chipset

The Motorola Signature also comes with the promise of up to seven years of Android operating system and security updates. So what’s the catch? Well, despite costing £899.99 (roughly $1,210 / AU$1,800) – which puts it between the price of the Samsung Galaxy S25 and the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus – it has just a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset.

This isn’t the company’s top chipset, with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 – which can be found in the likes of the OnePlus 15 and will likely be used by the Samsung Galaxy S26 series – substantially outperforming it.

Tests suggest that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5’s performance is more or less in line with the Snapdragon 8 Elite in the Samsung Galaxy S25 series at least, but we’d expect better for what this phone costs, especially as the S26 series is probably landing soon.

But given all the other specs on offer here, the Motorola Signature could still prove a compelling smartphone. We’ll let you know for sure once we’ve put it through a full review, but if you do want to buy it you’ll have to wait – there’s no confirmed release date for the UK yet (though it sounds like it’s coming soon), and no sign of any release in the US or Australia.

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