Motorola RAZR V3 - status symbol. How did one clamshell conquer the world
Preface from translator:
There are a lot of materials devoted to the RAZR V3 cult thing of its time and a lot of stories around it. Today I present to your attention the translation of the article by David Pierce. I decided to translate it, because personally I would like to see more truly worthwhile products from a design point of view.
Symbols of status are things that convey their functions and features and become something beautiful and luxurious on their own. These are things that can live after the megapixel and megahertz wars, regardless of them, the eternal lights of design and innovation.
In 2003, Nokia created the three most popular phones in the world. All three were short stumps, bricks with nine buttons and a small monochrome screen. All three looked and worked just like any other mobile phone on the market, but they cost $ 50, $ 20, or for free. That's why they were sold like hot cakes.
')
But early next year, under a glass case inside the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, a select group of 110 fashion journalists received an unexpected fleeting, high-tech look to the future. It was the Motorola RAZR V3, the phone that changed the world.
Jim Wicks, the chief designer in Motorola since 2000 (or since 2001, he himself doesn’t remember exactly), reports that he was always planning to change the world. “At that time, all the phones began to turn into such catchy, without bright features, shapeless things. Therefore, the idea of going beyond the framework was very, very unusual, it went against everything that the others were developing in the field of mobile devices at that time. ”
Motorola started this project with two attitudes, even mantras. Weeks and his team were obsessed with the idea of being “the kings of subtlety” without making “no compromises.” These things sound obvious today, but ten years ago they were unusually contradictory to intuition. Even without mentioning the complexity of the production: in the process of creating the thinnest phone on the market, Motorola had to reinvent and improve the technology behind the technology. Weeks wanted the phone to be made of metal, “a high-quality alloy, not stamped cheap.” But the metal blocked the phone’s radio transmitter, so Motorola repacked the wiring so that all antennas and chips were at the bottom of the device. Nowadays, RAZR’s infamous “chin” was created by necessity, and not by the sketches of designers. Even the keyboard has been rethought in the name of war for millimeters. “All keyboards started to get very small,” says Weeks. “And if you install the keyboard more, then you would not want these typical keys with pimples and protuberances that would take more than 5-10% of the thickness of the device. Thus, the case led to searches in the super-thin keyboard area, but if you make a super-thin keyboard, you cannot make it from membrane plastic pieces. Therefore, we made metal. ”
The phone looked and felt like nothing else on the market. RAZR was not created for millions of copies, but just to prove what Motorola is capable of. Weeks recalls: “when we showed the device to operators, many said something like:“ No. It will not take off. ”Quite a lot of people were interested, but not so much that everyone would sign up under the contract.” The announced price is $ 449, which is almost unheard of at the time. Editions called the phone a fashionable thing , a wonder.
But what Vicks found out in Copenhagen, RAZR, besides the whole movement around him, had one peculiarity that really meant something: it was cool. The phone stood out in gift bags at the Oscar ceremony, in an advertisement with Maria Sharapova , in Jason Bourne’s pocket , like a figurine in the Desktop Monopoly . According to Wicks, it was the first device to become something more than just a telephone, and the message to the world that Motorola supported with a huge and ruthless advertising campaign. “This is the first device that really went from being a call facility to a genuine consumer product and even became a fashionable thing.” Ed Beig from USA Today compared the phone with an expensive watch or sports car - no one acquired the RAZR from purely utilitarian arguments, but if you could afford it, he was out of competition.
In 2005 and 2006, everyone I knew was either already in possession of the RAZR, or wanted to buy it. My Motorola T193 with wireless charging from the operator Voicestream (T-Mobile) was one of the legion of impersonal monoblock phones, but my friends' RAZRs were like little things from Philip Dick's short stories. They were so thin, expertly crafted, with extremely sharp contours.
For many years, the price is all that mattered - operators were selling phones as cheaply as possible in a desperate attempt to sell as many contracts as possible. RAZR marked the beginning of a new era: Motorola has proven that people will pay good money for great devices. Without such competitive advantages as an app store or a good operating system, only iron remained, in which no company could compare with Motorola. Many tried, from Sanyo Katana (even the blade-like name was cocked) to the Samsung A900, but no one even managed to repeat the success. During the period of excellence, unsurpassed neither before nor after, for 12 consecutive quarters from 2004 to 2008, the RAZR remained the top-selling phone in the United States.
But on the crest of the RAZR popularity wave, over time reducing prices and margins so that the phone continued to be swept off the shelves, Motorola missed the appearance of the next stage in the development of phones: software and services. “We have not figured out that [RAZR] could undermine it,” says Weeks. “We did not invest in undermining our superiority. It was someone else. ”And even when Motorola tried to evolve and improve, it met with resistance from all-powerful operators. “We were in a stupor from an unsuccessful position when we braked the future product line and specifications because everyone said“ we want something similar, ”and when we once recorded wishes we started saying:“ OK, but this new The model looks like a RAZR. ”Then the iPhone came out and the market made the next turn in the mobile industry.
Smartphones killed RAZR once and for all, but it did not have to happen this way. Weeks points to the Ming phone line, which Motorola launched for China in 2006, the clamshell with a stylus and handwriting recognition could give Motorola a new life in the market for touch devices. “It was one of the most unknown, but one of the coolest products,” says Weeks. But the Ming phones never appeared anywhere else, and the iPhone almost decided how the next generation of phones would look like.
Motorola became the first company to prove that the design could sell the phone, and for three years, an eternity in the world of consumer electronics, it was unstoppable. The surrounding reality could have changed since then, but the lessons that Weeks and his team learned have remained unchanged. According to him, Motorola has learned that companies need superiority in design, design, marketing, or nothing will come of it. Design is the most difficult and most important thing: “If you have impeccable design and development without creating a great design, you will not go far.”
The RAZR time is gone, the clamshells are outdated - although Weeks does not rule out the return of this form factor. “I think technology will evolve. I mean, damn it, if you don't have to touch the phone to use it ... ”He pauses. Suddenly, I thought that we both dream of a Moto X clamshell. There are 130 million former RAZR owners who might be very excited by this thought.
There are a lot of materials devoted to the RAZR V3 cult thing of its time and a lot of stories around it. Today I present to your attention the translation of the article by David Pierce. I decided to translate it, because personally I would like to see more truly worthwhile products from a design point of view.
Symbols of status are things that convey their functions and features and become something beautiful and luxurious on their own. These are things that can live after the megapixel and megahertz wars, regardless of them, the eternal lights of design and innovation.
In 2003, Nokia created the three most popular phones in the world. All three were short stumps, bricks with nine buttons and a small monochrome screen. All three looked and worked just like any other mobile phone on the market, but they cost $ 50, $ 20, or for free. That's why they were sold like hot cakes.
')
But early next year, under a glass case inside the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, a select group of 110 fashion journalists received an unexpected fleeting, high-tech look to the future. It was the Motorola RAZR V3, the phone that changed the world.
Jim Wicks, the chief designer in Motorola since 2000 (or since 2001, he himself doesn’t remember exactly), reports that he was always planning to change the world. “At that time, all the phones began to turn into such catchy, without bright features, shapeless things. Therefore, the idea of going beyond the framework was very, very unusual, it went against everything that the others were developing in the field of mobile devices at that time. ”
Motorola started this project with two attitudes, even mantras. Weeks and his team were obsessed with the idea of being “the kings of subtlety” without making “no compromises.” These things sound obvious today, but ten years ago they were unusually contradictory to intuition. Even without mentioning the complexity of the production: in the process of creating the thinnest phone on the market, Motorola had to reinvent and improve the technology behind the technology. Weeks wanted the phone to be made of metal, “a high-quality alloy, not stamped cheap.” But the metal blocked the phone’s radio transmitter, so Motorola repacked the wiring so that all antennas and chips were at the bottom of the device. Nowadays, RAZR’s infamous “chin” was created by necessity, and not by the sketches of designers. Even the keyboard has been rethought in the name of war for millimeters. “All keyboards started to get very small,” says Weeks. “And if you install the keyboard more, then you would not want these typical keys with pimples and protuberances that would take more than 5-10% of the thickness of the device. Thus, the case led to searches in the super-thin keyboard area, but if you make a super-thin keyboard, you cannot make it from membrane plastic pieces. Therefore, we made metal. ”
The phone looked and felt like nothing else on the market. RAZR was not created for millions of copies, but just to prove what Motorola is capable of. Weeks recalls: “when we showed the device to operators, many said something like:“ No. It will not take off. ”Quite a lot of people were interested, but not so much that everyone would sign up under the contract.” The announced price is $ 449, which is almost unheard of at the time. Editions called the phone a fashionable thing , a wonder.
But what Vicks found out in Copenhagen, RAZR, besides the whole movement around him, had one peculiarity that really meant something: it was cool. The phone stood out in gift bags at the Oscar ceremony, in an advertisement with Maria Sharapova , in Jason Bourne’s pocket , like a figurine in the Desktop Monopoly . According to Wicks, it was the first device to become something more than just a telephone, and the message to the world that Motorola supported with a huge and ruthless advertising campaign. “This is the first device that really went from being a call facility to a genuine consumer product and even became a fashionable thing.” Ed Beig from USA Today compared the phone with an expensive watch or sports car - no one acquired the RAZR from purely utilitarian arguments, but if you could afford it, he was out of competition.
In 2005 and 2006, everyone I knew was either already in possession of the RAZR, or wanted to buy it. My Motorola T193 with wireless charging from the operator Voicestream (T-Mobile) was one of the legion of impersonal monoblock phones, but my friends' RAZRs were like little things from Philip Dick's short stories. They were so thin, expertly crafted, with extremely sharp contours.
For many years, the price is all that mattered - operators were selling phones as cheaply as possible in a desperate attempt to sell as many contracts as possible. RAZR marked the beginning of a new era: Motorola has proven that people will pay good money for great devices. Without such competitive advantages as an app store or a good operating system, only iron remained, in which no company could compare with Motorola. Many tried, from Sanyo Katana (even the blade-like name was cocked) to the Samsung A900, but no one even managed to repeat the success. During the period of excellence, unsurpassed neither before nor after, for 12 consecutive quarters from 2004 to 2008, the RAZR remained the top-selling phone in the United States.
But on the crest of the RAZR popularity wave, over time reducing prices and margins so that the phone continued to be swept off the shelves, Motorola missed the appearance of the next stage in the development of phones: software and services. “We have not figured out that [RAZR] could undermine it,” says Weeks. “We did not invest in undermining our superiority. It was someone else. ”And even when Motorola tried to evolve and improve, it met with resistance from all-powerful operators. “We were in a stupor from an unsuccessful position when we braked the future product line and specifications because everyone said“ we want something similar, ”and when we once recorded wishes we started saying:“ OK, but this new The model looks like a RAZR. ”Then the iPhone came out and the market made the next turn in the mobile industry.
Smartphones killed RAZR once and for all, but it did not have to happen this way. Weeks points to the Ming phone line, which Motorola launched for China in 2006, the clamshell with a stylus and handwriting recognition could give Motorola a new life in the market for touch devices. “It was one of the most unknown, but one of the coolest products,” says Weeks. But the Ming phones never appeared anywhere else, and the iPhone almost decided how the next generation of phones would look like.
Motorola became the first company to prove that the design could sell the phone, and for three years, an eternity in the world of consumer electronics, it was unstoppable. The surrounding reality could have changed since then, but the lessons that Weeks and his team learned have remained unchanged. According to him, Motorola has learned that companies need superiority in design, design, marketing, or nothing will come of it. Design is the most difficult and most important thing: “If you have impeccable design and development without creating a great design, you will not go far.”
The RAZR time is gone, the clamshells are outdated - although Weeks does not rule out the return of this form factor. “I think technology will evolve. I mean, damn it, if you don't have to touch the phone to use it ... ”He pauses. Suddenly, I thought that we both dream of a Moto X clamshell. There are 130 million former RAZR owners who might be very excited by this thought.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/200684/
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