The Evolution of Motorola Phones | Hacker News Reader

The Evolution of Motorola Phones

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It's not talked about much, but RAZR was a skunk works program inside of Moto started by a small group of engineers independent of management. By that point the company had been largely taken over by cost cutting style management. Lean/6 Sigma was everywhere, and pretty much all research/innovation centres were being shut down. C level was incredibly incompetent. Ed Zander, the most incompetent choice of all, was appointed as CEO in 2004.

The company basically looked like it was gonna die any day. Then RAZR happened. The swaths of incompetents had no idea how to leverage the success, but oh man they were able to spend great swathes of money on terrible ideas over the next few years.

Probably the pinnacle of this incompetency was collaborating with Steve Jobs on the first iTunes enabled phone (ROKR). Basically Moto management opened the doors to Apple/Jobs on how to build cell phones - gave full access to Apple's engineering teams with virtually no upside for Moto but lots for Apple.

RORK was a dud. Then iPhone came out a couple years later. I still remember the COO/CEOs downplaying it in town halls, saying things like "Where's the keyboard! No one is ever going to use a touch screen based device!". Of course, all the engineers knew the writing was on the wall - the iPhone was amazing.

Even by today's standards, the RAZR is a marvel of engineering and industrial design. It's insane how thin it is for 2004 considering the swappable battery and dual display.

Only thing holding it back was the sluggish SW and terrible UX, but that plagued most phones of the era.

>C level was incredibly incompetent.

Please name me a major western consumer electronics company of the era other than Apple that didn't have incompetents at the helm.

Nortel, Nokia, Blackberry, Ericsson, Siemens, Alcatel, Philips, all these phone makers are extinct. They all failed to see the writing on the wall that mobile HW is becoming a commodity and the SW and UX will make the difference. The original iPod proved this. It was built with off-the-shelf parts that every hardware maker had access to. Same with the original iPhone. Just off-the-shelf parts and the secret sauce was in the SW not the HW.

It feels like the only way to get to C level is to be as incompetent as possible.

I've often heard it said that a great CEO needs to be a visonary to see the future. (s)He needs as a "right hand man" a great finance person who sees the numbers and reins in all those dreams and ensure they don't overspend and run out of money. The problem is then the CEO retires and his "right hand man" is the obvious choice - but the right hand man doesn't have vision of where to spend money, only where to save money and that lack of vision kills the new development pipeline.

Even companies who make the least innovations (there isn't much you can do to make better soap or toilet paper) still need a visionary CEO to see investments that could pay off (could be automation to reduce costs, something to increase quality, or sometimes there really is a better soap).

I wish the CEO's had been right. Keyboards > touchscreens.

The iPhone allowed normies to ruin everything. Instead of programs, we have apps. Instead of websites, we have walled gardens. Instead of bbs systems and forums, we have IG, Facebook and TikTok. Blame the normies.

Edit: Your downvotes mean nothing to me. I've seen what makes you upvote.

The only problem is nobody knows how to make a useful keyboard that fits in my pocket. I hate touch screens in general, but a phone in my pocket is useful in many situations where I wouldn't bring a keyboard.

Some people still give rave reviews to the Blackberry keyboard

The moto backflip, despite being a flop, actually had a really cool idea on how to handle that. So did the blackberry priv. For whatever reason, the market just didn't want it. I guess the market has skinnier thumbs than me, because typing on even a 6.6" touchscreen feels like typing with boxing gloves on.

I got to play with an HP Veer circa 2011, a phone the size of a credit card, specifically to try out the keyboard (specifically, I remember visiting this website).

It was a far better typing experience than the iPhone SE ever was. Tactile feedback was solid, shockingly so.

The Veer's keyboard really worked well. The small screen was problematic for many sites, sure, and not having a good browser hurt it a lot (and especially the bugs, like reloading a webpage on first touch after inactivity, which means reloading it immediately after a long load time...). But the keyboard makes me want to use it again.

But could you swipe entire multi-syllable words in a single fluid gesture, and have it recognise what you meant? Sure, if I were pressing keys one by one, that tactile feedback would be great. But that's hardly ever how I "type" on my phone.

The Palm Pre had a surprisingly useful keyboard for its size. I've heard good things about the blackberry keyboard too.

The BlackBerry KEY2 was great. I was hoping a KEY3 would come out but haven't heard any updates. I recently tried Unihertz and F(x)tec phones but they were both terrible quality (WiFi dropping out and callers intermittently couldn't hear me on a phone call, respectively). For now, I've given up on keyboard phones. Coincidentally, I just bought a Motorola Edge 5G. There wasn't much logic to it: I wanted to be different/hipster, so I didn't just want a Samsung or Pixel. It has been good. The price was good for the quality.

There are lots of folding keyboards available. The problem is that they are made for using on a table. Phone doesn't work well on table.

It should be possible to make keyboard the size of a phone that can be used in the hands. The problem is how to hold it, maybe the iPhone magnets would make that possible. I think the main problem is that everyone is used to using touchscreen keyboard and wouldn't think to use keyboard.

I have an ancient Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard, one of the best folding keyboards made, and I have stopped bringing it along. I found that screen keyboard is fine for small amount of typing. And if I need to do actual work, then laptop or tablet is needed.

My brother, any time I see someone use 'normie' unironically, I automatically stop listening to what they have to say. 'smart' phones prior to the iphone were terrible from a user experience point of view.

You can pretend that average people aren't making things worse all you want. Does not take away from the truth. Internet was better before the iPhone made it easy for normies to access it.

Hi. Perhaps you and I and others can be part of making it good.

I went through a phase of seeking outrage online, and while I’m not wholly reformed, I can report that some conscious reflection and rededication of where my emotional energy goes has helped me feel better and have more fun.

A tour of your comment history find a very large proportion that might be characterized as political outrage, attacks on other commenters, or dead/flagged responses.

I don’t presume to know you or how you’re doing, but in all sincerity and interest in a fellow human and member of the technerd tribe, I might gently suggest exploring how you’re engaging here, and if another approach might accrue long term benefits.

Take care.

I'm not required to type the way you see fit. HN needs to wake up and realize that it's not "muh secret club" where everyone is required to act like some cringe ultrapolite some wannabe philosopher. Try speaking your mind sometime instead of going out of your way to be pompous. You might find you like it.

And after iphone they are still terrible. The lock screen on Iphone is a dark pattern. The emergency button is below the password field. I have always to force myself to not touch this button.

I'm sort of on the fence on that one still. The web is a fucking mess these days and the well developed apps are quite refreshing in comparison to half baked piles of excrement web offerings from the big technology companies and open source ecosystem.

What I really want is Gopher and a few well engineered portable native apps that aren't supported by advertising hegemonies.

Oh and nothing freedesktop has gone anywhere near.

> Then iPhone came out a couple years later. I still remember the COO/CEOs downplaying it in town halls, saying things like "Where's the keyboard! No one is ever going to use a touch screen based device!".

... knowing full-well that Motorola had no-keyboard Linux-based smartphones that they refused to sell. Back in the 1999-2000 timeframe, Motorola took them to college recruiting events and let kids play around with them. It worked on me. I was in the Arlington Heights labs testing UMTS systems with those smartphones from 2001-2006. We used to stream ESPN videos on them, for "testing". Every once in a while, we'd slip up and accidentally let them connect to the real mobile networks, and saw first-hand what everyone that bought in iPhone in 2007 saw with data rates...

Seeing that the original iPhone used Infineon chips gives me the impression that Apple learned from Motorola how NOT to build mobile phones. Wondering how many Motorola employees went to work at Apple back then.

A lot did. Apple had regular recruiting events down the road from Mot HQ around that time (2004-2006), specifically to poach Mot engineers.

Would love to read more about those recruiting events down the road from Motorola headquarters. This sounds like something that would have needed to be kept on the down-low.

Well I went to some of them :). It was pretty funny since I knew many people there - and we even talked about it at work. Around that time (2006) it was clear Mot was going to die so everyone was either looking for a new job or trying to get laid off with a nice severance package.

Apple booked a hotel conference room down the road from the Schaumburg office and had Apple engineers there. I even met with some of the original iPhone software team. They spoke with us and took our CVs, and if they liked you, flew you to 1 Infinite Loop for interviews.

I guess the huge leap of capacitive touch over previous technologies is kind of a footnote, but definitely bears mentioning here. Probably CEOs/COOs would have been plenty familiar with resistive touch which was much worse technology before 2007.

Gamecom, Palm, Casio would have employed this virtually unusable stuff, and the very idea of a touchscreen might have still seemed funny, if you hadn't have tried it yet.

This is mostly OT, but I really miss smaller phones. I found my old iphone 3g the other day, and I realized it was the perfect size for a smart phone. I really like motorolla, but their phones have become hulking monstrosities...

The most amusing thing to me about the ROKR was Jobs' clear distain for the device when presenting it on stage.

I wonder how much influence/impetus it provided for the iphone. I'm sure we'll never know (and I'm equally sure there are various articles claiming the impact was lots, or little).

The first cellphone I bought was a Motorola Alpha https://www.mobilecollectors.net/phone/3802/motorola-microta...

I thought it was odd - and a bit misleading that it had the words "Digital Personal Communicator" on the box. I knew it couldn't communicate digitally but it did get me to imagine what that would be like.

I assume digital referred to the storage of phone numbers + names which was a novel feature at the time. The display wasn't seven segment LED like previous versions, it had low-res green dot matrix LED arrays that could display a few crude alphanumeric characeters.

No mention of the a1000? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000

3g, 1mpix rear camera with video, front camera, stereo speakers, properly located gaming controls, Bluetooth, apps, UIQ2 so you could add a full-screen touch keyboard, opera web browser with flash javascript and landscape, vcal/vcard/sync, divx, big screen, personalJava, USB, microsd, dockable stylus, and a huge (at the time) battery.

At the time, even stereo speakers were a big deal. This was years ahead of most other phones

Sad to see no mention of the Motorola Q (1) which I got in 2006. My first mobile phone was also my first ‘smartphone’ with a full keyboard. I didn’t have any cellular service (I was a child) so I downloaded a ~2gb package with 350,000 text-only Wikipedia articles onto a MiniSD card (before microSD!), and that kept me endlessly occupied.

I still have that device, quite possibly my oldest possession. Maybe one day I’ll find a way to get it working.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Q

I got my first phone when I joined Motorola in 1998. This was a StarTac and it was fantastic (anything would be for a first phone but its form factor was great, especially that it was fashionable to wear it on your belt)

I went through the RAZR (really cool too) and finally the Q when I left in 2008.

10 years of really great phones and a cool part of my life.

Cool to see, I used this one for some years: [0], specifically because it was a Linux phone. That fact never had any impact on the use of it, sadly, I was expecting some hackability back then, while the openmoko remained vaporware...

[0] https://phonesdata.com/en/smartphones/motorola/a780-892/

I know this isn't a Motorola phone as a standalone, but the StarTac had an accessory that you can add to the back of the phone which was a PDA. This was probably my favorite thing from Motorola (I was a kid).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/redfiremg/3952257080

no mention of motorola e1000 (it was good phone with good feature set but motherboard died on me 3 time) or motorola atrix, which was first phone with dock that you could hook up screen/etc to and run ubuntu desktop from

Man, the E1000 was a fantastic phone. Extremely tough little phone too, at one point we jacked up a Toyota Landcruiser on top of it, and the case/screen didn't even scratch.

My dad had the bag phone, but the bag itself sat on a shelf in the closet. The handset was mounted to the dashboard of his truck, so we used the term "car phone" rather than "bag phone."

De-paywall-ed: https://archive.is/0LWYb

The StarTAC's antenna was a bit flimsy but the form factor and battery life (in comparison) were top notch compared to most other phones of that time.

The antenna was fake anyway.

Little weird that, for such a simple article, they completely cut out phones between the Droid and new Razr. I thought the Moto X was iconic. Being able to customize it and buy it online was pretty big at the time.

The period when Google owned Motorola was very interesting. The Moto G was a great budget device that I think was killed by carriers who wanted to push $1000 phablets that required consumers to finance them.

The moto g's continue to be great budget(ish ~200 new) devices.

They're the last two phones I've bought, the first lasted ~3 years before I broke it, still good enough for the internet at large when I did. Replaced it with a G8 a couple years ago, still going strong.

Minimal fucking with android, microsd slot, magnetic compass, enough battery to last a weekend if you're careful.

Moto G Power lasts for days and costs $150 unlocked. I got one for one of my kids and it's been incredible. Thinking of getting one for myself. The difference in features between it and a $1000 flagship just aren't that noticeable anymore. And battery is the number one differentiator for any device now.

Camera is a bit shit (by 2020 standards) but that's my only complaint (my current phone is the g8 power) and that might be fixable with a different camera app.

They looked great on paper, but my wife managed to destroy 2 in a couple months. I gave up and replaced with a Samsung that she has had for 4 years (IIRC, I can't remember when she bought it).

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