Motorola is going ultra premium with its $1,600 ‘Signature’ phone

Motorola is trying something it hasn’t attempted in the modern smartphone era: to make an all-out flagship slab-style phone.

Previous high-end Edge devices never quite hit the mark, and lacked features that would put it in the highest flagship tiers. The company has had plenty of success with its Razr clamshell foldables, leaning on brand nostalgia and daring to make phones that actually look good. But it’s trying something different with its new Signature line, which until now hasn’t been available in the US. The Signature 27 goes a step further toward premium, daring to take on the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra. Motorola is leaning into a luxury aesthetic, offering a stacked feature set — with an equally luxurious $1,599 price tag.

It’s a lot to ask for a starting price, but it does get you 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM, the same as the S26 Ultra’s $1,599, 512GB variant. Samsung does offer a cheaper 256GB configuration for $1,399, though.

We got our first look at the Signature 27 when Motorola previewed it earlier this year, revealing that it would use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset. The company dropped a few other details, too, like Bang & Olufsen-designed audio, 50-megapixel and 200-megapixel telephoto cameras, and two Pantone color options. Today’s full announcement fills in the gaps. It will come with a 7,000mAh silicon-carbon battery, a 6.8-inch tandem OLED screen, IP68/IP69 ratings for full dust and water resistance, and 12GB of RAM. The Signature 27 will also support the privacy-focused GrapheneOS — a first for Motorola, and for a mainstream phone sold in the US, for that matter.

It’s hard to find fault with the 27’s feature set, aside from the lack of built-in Qi2 magnets, which is a bummer. The tandem OLED display uses two light-emitting panels to reach a peak brightness of 12,000 nits. The more battery efficient dual-layer might mean that the phone can reach its highest brightness setting without drawing too much power and overheating the phone, but we’ll want to see if that bears out in practice.

The camera array features a 50-megapixel Sony Lytia L910 sensor with LOFIC technology, meaning it should deliver plenty of dynamic range. In addition to a 3x 200-megapixel camera and a 50-megapixel ultrawide, there’s also an Event Vision Sensor, or EVS. It’s designed to identify movement on a pixel level, which Motorola says will help “capture fast-moving subjects with greater clarity and precision.”

That Bang & Olufsen audio system includes a redesigned speaker architecture for sound that’s “meant to be felt, not just heard,” according to Motorola’s press release. That’d be quite a feat to pull off with a smartphone audio system and I’m not holding my breath. Elsewhere, the Signature 27 offers up to 90W wired charging and up to 50W wireless charging — though you’ll need to use Motorola’s proprietary wireless charger. But in better news, Motorola is promising seven years of OS upgrades for the Signature 27, putting it right up there with the best support policies from Samsung and Google.

Maybe it’s a case of unlucky timing that Motorola decided to go toe-to-toe with Samsung’s premium flagship just as we started gearing up for RAMageddon: Year Two. Maybe in a few years’ time every flagship phone will cost well over $1,000. But right now, $1.600 is a steep hill to ask people to climb, and the Signature 27 will need to come up with more than just an impressive spec sheet.

And just to prove a point, Motorola is also announcing some updates to its wider ecosystem, too. The new Moto Watch Fit 27 claims up to 12 days of battery life, and the Moto Buds 27 offer Bose ANC with IP57 ratings for both the buds and the case. Motorola isn’t announcing pricing or an exact release date for either in the US, only that they’ll be available in the coming months. Both will arrive in the coming “weeks” in Europe and the UK, where the watch will start at £99.99 (about $134 US) and the buds will cost £179.99 (about $242).

Pre-sales for the Signature 27 start on November 19th in the US; the phone goes on sale November 26th.