It’s taken a time, a very, very long time, but it now looks as though the current keepers of Motorola Mobile, Lenovo, will launch a restomod Razr.
The line drawings here show a recent patent application by Motorola Mobility for a new phone with a folding display. The photographs next to the patent pictures are of the original Razor concept model which I took in 2003. More than fifteen years separate the two and yet the design detail created by Chris Arnholt , shines through. It’s interesting to understand the legacy of this design.
Before Apple ruined innovation all phones looked different. Nokia phones were distinctive bars. Ericsson phones were square and Germanic, and Samsung’s flips had an air of the toilet seat. Much as a car geek can tell a car from the shape of a wheel arch or a-pillar, a phone geek could recognise the brand from the design language. With one exception: Motorola. The company was run in fiefdoms and each had a different view of what the Motorola look should be.
Under the stewardship of the late and exceptionally great Geoffrey Frost, it was decided that there should be a Motorola design language. Except it wasn’t there were to be four design languages. An angular “male” one which became Razr, a curvy sexy female one which became Pebbl, a funky kids one which never made the market called Tattoo and, even then in 2003, a retro design based on StarTac.
No-one foresaw the success of Razr. I sat in on the committee which approved new products and we needed a projected shipment figure of three million units to pass a project. Razr was pitched with 800,000. An out of the box fail. It also failed on a score of other metrics. It was hard to make, the keypad could not be sourced from multiple vendors, there were no pre-orders from mobile networks. It should have been kicked out at the first proposal meeting. And yet Geoffrey stood up for it. The 800,000 figure was chosen because that was break-even. It was what the V70 (condemned Hummingbird) had sold and while it had not been hugely profitable it had been a great halo product. I later found out that the team working on Razr had actually projected sales of 300,000 but knew that would not get board approval so they lied. It went on to sell 100 million units with everyone from Jeremy Clarkson to David Beckham being spotted with one. Launched in 2003 the original RAZR was the phone to be seen with, despite being a simple flip phone it was envisaged as a super expensive style icon to be sold at over £800 and was built by a crack team of Motorola engineers making time for project in evenings and weekends in a top-secret skunkworks and without management blessing.
This is the first time anyone will have seen pictures of the original 2003 concept model side by side with the latest patents. I took the photographs at a secret off-site ideas workshop where the model was show to give an idea of what phones might look like in the future.
The success of Razr steamrollered the other design directions. The chamfered edge design which was supposedly “male” selling many millions in pink.
The line drawings here show a recent patent application by Motorola Mobility for a new phone with a folding display. The photographs next to the patent pictures are of the original Razor concept model which I took in 2003. More than fifteen years separate the two and yet the design detail created by Chris Arnholt , shines through. It’s interesting to understand the legacy of this design.
Before Apple ruined innovation all phones looked different. Nokia phones were distinctive bars. Ericsson phones were square and Germanic, and Samsung’s flips had an air of the toilet seat. Much as a car geek can tell a car from the shape of a wheel arch or a-pillar, a phone geek could recognise the brand from the design language. With one exception: Motorola. The company was run in fiefdoms and each had a different view of what the Motorola look should be.
Under the stewardship of the late and exceptionally great Geoffrey Frost, it was decided that there should be a Motorola design language. Except it wasn’t there were to be four design languages. An angular “male” one which became Razr, a curvy sexy female one which became Pebbl, a funky kids one which never made the market called Tattoo and, even then in 2003, a retro design based on StarTac.
No-one foresaw the success of Razr. I sat in on the committee which approved new products and we needed a projected shipment figure of three million units to pass a project. Razr was pitched with 800,000. An out of the box fail. It also failed on a score of other metrics. It was hard to make, the keypad could not be sourced from multiple vendors, there were no pre-orders from mobile networks. It should have been kicked out at the first proposal meeting. And yet Geoffrey stood up for it. The 800,000 figure was chosen because that was break-even. It was what the V70 (condemned Hummingbird) had sold and while it had not been hugely profitable it had been a great halo product. I later found out that the team working on Razr had actually projected sales of 300,000 but knew that would not get board approval so they lied. It went on to sell 100 million units with everyone from Jeremy Clarkson to David Beckham being spotted with one. Launched in 2003 the original RAZR was the phone to be seen with, despite being a simple flip phone it was envisaged as a super expensive style icon to be sold at over £800 and was built by a crack team of Motorola engineers making time for project in evenings and weekends in a top-secret skunkworks and without management blessing.
This is the first time anyone will have seen pictures of the original 2003 concept model side by side with the latest patents. I took the photographs at a secret off-site ideas workshop where the model was show to give an idea of what phones might look like in the future.
The success of Razr steamrollered the other design directions. The chamfered edge design which was supposedly “male” selling many millions in pink.
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