This may well be a pivotal moment for Motorola in India, as the smartphone maker is taking full advantage of the sales momentum, to build a fourth product umbrella within its portfolio. It is the Signature series, which will essentially sit alongside the Razr foldables in terms of the premium positioning and experience, with the Edge series as well as the Moto G phones for the slightly lower price bands respectively. Momentum has been clear for the past few quarters. In Q3 2025, Motorola’s year-on-year 52.4% shipment growth gave it a 8.3% market share (up from 5.7%). Good time as any to introduce a logical successor to the finely remembered Moto X after many years, and build on the groundwork of the Edge 70 phones.
The Motorola Signature, a simple naming scheme that’s much appreciated, is priced ₹59,999 onwards (though there are some launch offer discounts you may want to factor in). This phone, a flagship priced in ‘flagship killer’ territory, is in direct competition with the OnePlus 15 or Vivo X300, and yet that has a significantly lower price tag — the former commands ₹72,999 while the latter hopes you’ll part with ₹75,999. And if you’re paying this much for the Motorola Signature, you’re buying something with a higher experience baseline for a little more money, than the likes of the Vivo V60 or the OnePlus 15R. Clearly, someone at Motorola found this safe spot in a space that otherwise looks overwhelmed with competition. And that fine attention to details didn’t stop there — the Motorola Signature becomes one of the rare options to have a 16GB RAM and a 1TB storage combination as well, alongside 12+256GB and 16+512GB variants.
Before I talk about specific design elements that define the Motorola Signature, it’s important to understand the trajectory that got us here. The impressive Edge 70 which was launched a while ago, has a textured finish on the back, and before that, Motorola has tried the wooden finish, a marble finish and a regal vegan leather finish as well in previous generations. To get to the Motorola Signature’s Pantone Martini Olive colour with its twill-inspired finish, it’s clearly been a part of effort. This has a very nice fabric-esque texture and feels very similar to it too. Not the slimmest at least on first glance, but it’s just 6.99mm thick, and the flat slab design makes this quite handy. Little of you realise at first glance, the audio is tuned by Bose.
The Motorola Signature becomes one of the early phones abroad Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip train, the other being the impressive OnePlus 15R. Remember I had called the Signature a flagship in the flagship killer territory earlier? The context comes from this comparison, wherein the OnePlus 15R doesn’t have wireless charging, high-res audio support and is a step behind in terms of the camera hardware — these minor and major details matter. Motorola has kept the proportion really strong on that front, and that’s exactly where it is a step ahead of the alternative, more value oriented flagships. Performance leaves absolutely nothing to complain about, and that’s also helped by Motorola’s newly designed cooling system called ‘Arctic Mesh’ — you may not realise it most of the time, but this helps keep things cool, which helps holding performance levels for longer. Most noticeable when gaming, or extensive video recording usage. But then again, the choice of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip wasn’t just performance, but the foundation it provides for app performance, on-device AI, and image as well as video processing.
The sliced GPU architecture means an up to 11% improvement over the previous generation and up to 28% better power efficiency. Qualcomm’s Hexagon neural processing unit claims an up to 46% improvement in AI performance, which is a great underliner for the Moto AI suite. A good time to talk about the fact that it includes Perplexity’s models as well Microsoft’s Copilot models for the Ask Perplexity and Ask Copilot features as part of universal search. If you do feel a little overwhelmed by what all Moto AI can do, you wouldn’t be wrong. There simply is a lot happening, which should deliver value in the long term for sure. This time, Motorola is dividing the AI suite into three main categories — assist, sense and create.
Create includes elements such as personalised suggestions and an elaborate Image Studio for creating images or avatars or even styling photos, while Assist has something called Catch Me Up that puts together summaries of notifications and messages across apps you choose. Sense may be a bit of a hit and miss at times depending on what utility you may derive from it, from transcribing meetings to invoking Moto AI to share any screenshot, text or link with it for referencing at a later time.
The display with Pantone validated colours, and being the first phone with Sony’s 50-megapixel LYTIA 828 camera sensor, form crucial elements that crown the overall Motorola Signature experience. I’ll talk about the camera first, which is an especially impressive troika of the LYTIA 828, a 50-megapixel LYTIA 600 periscope camera, and a 50-megapixel ultra wide camera. The Motorola Signature’s photography results are impressive not just because of the flagship optical stack, but also the pristine image processing algorithms which define how the photos you click finally emerge into the gallery. There is genuine depth to photos in terms of contrast, black levels and an accuracy of skin tones in particularly difficult lighting conditions.
You’ve to be a bit careful with the fisheye effect when photographing a subject or object up close, but stepping back and zooming in a notch delivers fantastic results. Low light photos are particularly impressive, and though you still need to hold steady for a fraction of a second longer than usual, the optical image stabilisation coupled with the all-pixel focus tech means the subject is much sharper and detailed than many other phones can manage in similar lighting. This OIS is quite the robust foundation for video stability as well, which being the 3.5 degree OIS angle, is an industry first. The Motorola Signature can do up to 8K video recordings at 30fps and all sensors can record 4K videos at 60fps. The main sensor can also be 120 frames per second slow motion, and in all instances, you’ll be most impressed by the dynamic range as well as accuracy of colours borne from a neutral processing standpoint.
The camera app, at this time, has one crucial drawback — it doesn’t always remember the previous settings for shooting and also the Style selection, which is fixable with a future update, remains a bit of an annoyance for now. The Super Zoom Pro, which is the headliner for the 100x AI driven zoom on the periscope lens, will deliver mileage depending on what you’re shooting and your preference for details that may at times clearly look artificially boosted. The idea that Motorola is going with clearly is usable zoom photos, and to that extent, it delivers.
Motorola claims this is the brightest display in a smartphone with Pantone validated colours, and I wouldn’t argue with that claim, considering how well this screen illuminates even under a fairly bright afternoon sunshine. Interestingly enough, Motorola calls the Signature’s 6.8-inch screen an Extreme AMOLED, rated at 6200 nits of peak brightness and support for 165Hz at 1.5K resolution. Equally impressive is the battery stamina that the Motorola Signature delivers. The claims of being the largest battery on an ultra-thin phone thus far, at 5200mAh, does deliver close to 7 hours of screen usage time. Initially, there was 6% battery drain in standby overnight and that continued for almost 4 days after setup, but subsequently reduced to 3% once things stabilised. Fast charging on wired and wireless too, 90-watt and 50-watt respectively, which can get this silicon carbon battery juiced up for the day ahead in quick enough time.
There is a clear sense that the Motorola Signature is checking off every conceivable point on a flagship checklist, without really breaking into a sweat. Does this effectively recalibrate the baseline of the flagship expectation? Motorola is flexing the specs and therefore the experience, without really making either the highlight of this product. The choice of processor, the camera optimisations, the tuning of the display and the attempted usefulness of Moto AI, all point to one thing — the Motorola Signature is a deliberate and well thought out smartphone. Good value too, at ₹59,999 and that price tag should make the competition rethink their flagship pricing. More than anything else, this firmly re-establishes Motorola as a serious flagship player. To get things so right in a segment where margin for error is no thin, is no mean feat.