Motorola Razr V3 Cellphone: The trend-setter that shouldn't have existed

In 2003, a 14mm-thick phone cost $500.

In 2018, a 5mm-thick phone costs <$15.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-Mini-Phone-AEKU-C6-Color...

The level of integration has increased immensely, there's not much inside one of these phones:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107

"The RAZR was the first phone to recognize that cellphones [...] were on the tipping point to becoming fashion accessories"

Meanwhile, Siemens bet (and lost) a whole sub-brand of absurd design experiments on the idea of phones becoming fashion accessories. Xelibri had all the boldness and cluelessness of a teenager getting killed climbing up a power line pole to impress the girls. Xelibri were truly "phones that should not have existed", a monument to organizational bad judgement. (The 5 and 7 models were kind of cool though, but those were absolute outliers in the lineup)

I remember those times and that phone. Indeed that was an awesome piece of design and as a mobile phone (as in "tool for making phone calls on the go") it checked all the boxes.

The software side was quite limited though.

Specifically, at the time I was diving into J2ME development (THAT was strangely pleasant to look backwards -- a pain to make it work, but such great satisfaction to overcome all those limitations) and the number of JSR it's JVM (or better, KVM) implemented was pretty low. For this reason, I decided to buy the awesome Nokia N73 (Express Music edition).

Had the first RAZER back in the days. I loved how it felt. The metal case, the colorful screen, it even had a small screen outside showing the amount of missed calls/messages/connection. This was really one of the best phones I ever had. Fun-Fact: I had this phone for quite a few months and then it started to appear more often in German television (back in the day there was no Netflix so you had to wait for tv series to get translated and were always one season at least behind). Suddenly many friends were buying it too :D

I just bought one a few months ago when my 13 year old Nokia died. I actually dislike the phone quite a bit and prefer my old Nokia. I have to charge the Razr about every other day, even if I haven't used it for calls. It takes too many button presses to do anything. It isn't very responsive (it takes about 4 seconds for each text deletion). If I receive a missed call or text the phone will vibrate every 5 minutes until I open the phone. This is really annoying in the middle of the night, and when I'm talking to someone at work and my phone won't stop making noise. It supports SMS and MMS, but doesn't actually do well with group texts. Sometimes I can open them, sometimes I can then see what the person sent, and other times the message won't open at all. Also, maybe I'm just dumb, but I can't figure out how to add apostrophes to text messages, which bothers me (especially because I talk to a lot of non-native speakers and I don't want to reinforce poor grammar). Maybe different providers had better interfaces that solve some of these problems, though.

The only things I appreciate about the phone are that it has a USB port for charging instead of a barrel plug, and it can store more messages.

As an aside & question - I hate this slim, light goal. What I want is a thick phone with a battery that can stand heavy use for at least 24 hours (preferably changeable), and doesn't really need a case. To me it doesn't make sense to see this obsession with tiny phones that most people put cases on.

To be fair, the Razr 3 had good battery life and couldn't have a case, but in this world: Anyone have suggestions?

In 2003, industry best selling and flagship Razr cost $500

In 2018, Apple's flagship iPhone cost ( starts ) $999.

I still don't know what to make of those "numbers". A lot fo jobs outside of Tech Sector had lower salary now in real terms than in 2003, and housing price are many times of those in 2003.

My first mobile phone was a Motorola V50 flip phone [1] which cost £500 in 2000. Despite being released four years before the RAZR V3 [2] it was both smaller and lighter (although slightly thicker). I reckon it would still look cool today if they upgraded the screen.

I can't remember why, but I didn't bother buying any RAZRs and my next phone purchase was a Sony Ericsson K800 [3] in 2006.

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_v50-223.php (83 grams, 83 x 44 mm)

[2] https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_razr_v3-853.php (95 grams, 98 x 53 mm)

[3] https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_k800-1485.php (115 grams, 105 x 47 mm)

Great phone, loved using it until the benefits of the smartphone became too great to ignore. If I ever decided to give up on smartphones and move to a dumbphone (which isn't that far-fetched - I can use tablet for the most "smart" parts anyway) I'd probably get something like a Razr again. I love the tactical feedback of a flip-phone - you know how to answer a call and how to end it, and it has a physical feel to it that I still miss in smartphones.

>“The scale of the hit of RAZR is hard to comprehend. Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse ordered a quarter of a million in pink. We thought he was mad, this was a third of the global projected sales. He wanted this crazy volume of the “boys” phone to sell to girls in the UK. We gave him exclusivity on the pink colour. When he sold 3 million we bought the non-UK rights back.”

Reading this makes me wince at the monoculture. I can imagine the meetings; "You mean women are a major part of the mobile phone market? And they spend money on high quality design? And some men like pink too? Oh, and you are saying some women don't? Here, let me write this down, this stuff is out there."

I had one as a kid but I disliked it. The battery life was terrible and it constantly crashed, as I recall.

I remember hacking around with this phone and trying to get apps on it. I think you could run jars on it, but it was a hassle to load them. And I think there weren't actually many apps available either.

"The RAZR was the first phone to recognize that cellphones [...] were on the tipping point to becoming fashion accessories"

Was RAZR really released in 2003? Searches seem to bring up varying dates, mostly mentioning mid to late 2004. In Japan, there was the AU Design Project, a carrier-led project established in 2002 which created concept mockups and eventually actual products with a focus on industrial design and fashionability. Their first model, Infobar, was released in Oct 2004; depending on when RAZR was really released it brings the "first" mention above into question.

The project released many other products over the years, such as the Marc Newson-designed Talby or even the polka dotted Yayoi Kusama art edition, but Infobar in particular went on to release several iterations, even continuing into the smartphone era. Too bad none of them ever got visibility outside of Japan due to this being a project led by a domestic carrier with no intentions of letting the manufacturers release the same designs outside of them. https://time-space.kddi.com/adp15th/#product

Those were heady days for phone manufacturers, and telecommunications in general. Motorola was flush with cash.

Nowadays, product management in the phone industry is comparatively dull. Its just about predicting how many iPhones you will sell, begging Apple to allocate as many launch devices to you as possible, and then figuring out which ZTE or Huawei Android device you will sell for $99 on your subsidised prepaid range.

Do any of these old phones still work on modern mobile networks (even just GSM or CDMA)?

The Samsung sph-i500 was another great small phone running PalmOS that came out soon after, with a similar form factor to the Razr.

I always preferred the follow up, the Razr 2 V9. Came a year or less before the iPhone I think.

Ran some version of Linux, with lots more storage and SD slot, and if I can remember much slicker menus than the v3. There was some way of getting shell access too.

Finally enough storage to use for music sometimes, and an effective touch interface to the music player when closed on the mini screen. Trouble is it had no 3.5 jack and a terrible usb headphone dongle, designed to break every three uses, and catch on something every 5 minutes, making it useless as music player. What a waste.

Build quality that means my very heavily used 12 year old phone still looks and feels new except for losing the little plastic charge port cover. Can't get batteries reliably now though so it's not even an emergency backup for much longer.

I owned one too. Great phone when it comes to design and feel. The outside screen was great!

Downsides: - very bad dictionary, writing amaras horrible (comparing to Nokia for example) - software was also a bit clunky - I tried to write some app for it but hit the wall of not having some expensive license

I was working in the telecom industry back then, and had to test phones' OTA compatibility with some enterprise software. I had to deal with Motorola's awful software for years, and as a result RAZR evokes something different for me than the hardware.

The flip side of the RAZR's skunkwork origin was the not-skunkwork-part. That is, being part of Motorola, which meant: (1) relying on Motorola firmware that was slow, ugly, and an UX joke, even by those years' standards, and (2) as soon as they found out those things would sell, the started milking it endlessly, with only minimal updates. The "it's a slim phone!" gimick got old fast. As a matter of fact, Motorola would not produce anything headline-worthy until the Droid. That's quite a long time.

> The precision of the build quality, and the use of real metal throughout, are on par with products today.

I had a RAZR early on, and I would agree that the build quality was excellent. I bought several more to give to family members in the 2010-2011 time frame -- bought both online and in phone stores -- and found that the build quality had deteriorated badly (though they were much cheaper than the original RAZR). Back covers wouldn't snap shut as securely, edges didn't meet precisely, had to recharge much more frequently, buttons didn't click as smoothly, and some parts felt like painted plastic rather than metal. To this day I don't know if I received counterfeits or if Motorola regressed enormously in build quality to make them less expensive.

I had a series if RAZRs before Palm based phones were a thing. I did enjoy them greatly and carried them on a belt holster that was more convenient in my mind than the pocket that now houses my modern phone.

Despite the article’s claim of how revolutionary this phone was, it always felt like an evolution of the Motorola StarTAC to me. I purchased the first one of these, it must have been 1997-1998, and I recall paying $1,200. It had literally unlimited battery life because it had two separate batteries, one on each half of the clamshell, and you could hot swap them while on a call. Various sizes were available. They could be charged faster than they ran out and I carried a spare or few with me.

Granted it had just a (I do not recall now) one or two line dot matrix display and a limited feature set (there was messaging but I do think it predated SMS). But to me that StarTAC was the innovative phone and not this RAZR.

I love how dynamic and interesting the cell phone hardware industry used to be. Now every phone announcement usually elicits boredom from me. Of course, the same could be said of computer hardware in the 80s and 90s, and CPU architectures, etc. The world has seemed to converge on one or at most a few designs of most things hardware and real innovation seems to come at a much slower pace.

I had this phone and the name was fitting. Face stubble would get caught between the laser cut metal keypad. And you could feel the little hairs being yanked out.

I think this flip phone would still sell today if they would make it.

I was in a retro mood recently and actually looked at a flip phone to buy and the cheapest I could find in my country was about the same price as a low-cost Android. So, no buy.

The guys selling under the Nokia brand are also rejuvenating old products but they are going too far: I don't want a Nokia with a color screen, better graphics and an app store for games. I would want precisely a black and white (or e-ink!) display, no external apps whatsoever and no game included by default. There should be no reason to fiddle with a retro phone.

Does anyone here have any experience in getting photos off of old RAZRs? I have a similar phone that (I believe) uses the same firmware. It looks like the software to do so (Motorola Media Link?) was offline, or at least I couldn't locate it anywhere. I've got some photos of an old friend who passed away on there, but no way to get them off.

I am amused that they considered the PEBL “for girls”. I had a PEBL as the last flip phone I used before switching to a BlackBerry. I appreciated that I could flip it open and start dialing or texting with one hand (it was almost as satisfying as an automatic knife in its mechanics). The PEBL fit better in a jeans pocket than the RAZR did for me.

This phone got me off Nokia. Great little phone. Hello Moto! Then the iPhone 3Gs came along and the rest is history

As a mobile dev at the time, I wish motorola had faster CPUS (or it may have just their JVM lacking a JIT).

Either way, Sony and Nokia had decent speed, but motorola was like molasses, which is a shame as they weren't too bad to dev for.

Don't forget the precursors to RAZR :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarTAC

I owned one of these when it came out. It felt solid but my biggest fear is the connection between lid and the base becoming flaky and breaks. Luckily it never happened.

Ehh, I remember these braking constantly compared to the vastly superior nokia/candybar form factor. Still decent and quite popular at the time.

Bring it back!

I had miss this phone, but I realize that I wouldn't want it today.

One of the big reasons is I don't memorize phone numbers anymore - as cool as the RAZR was, I don't have need for a flip phone of any kind. The numbers I dial are typically entered in once and then dialed from my phone book.