I had a variation of that mini phone you linked to (the internals get repackaged by various manufacturers). Mine was exactly the height and width of a credit card, and not very thick. It was lovely in my pocket, so unobtrusive. Everyone thought it was a calculator. :) Had to give it up after a while because the battery was really bad. One serious call and it was toast, and the battery got worse with age. If they made a model with a swappable battery it would be more tolerable because I could take some spares with me.
Saw something that probably was an iPod the other day. For a few seconds I thought it was a new iPhone (can't remember seeing an iPod in years).
I want a phone in that size:
- Small.
- With touchscreen,
- With a browser
- With downloadable or even uploadable apps (basic ones like maps and messaging clients would be enough, don't need games or 3d, just don't want to rely on my operator or the manufacturer to create a new firmware before I can swap my messaging client.)
- A quick camera that is good enough for everyday pictures: whiteboards, messaging.
I think it was quite a bit smaller than even iPhone 4 (I'm not really into Apple products though.)
> Or an Apple Watch with Cellular?
Way to small, I want it to be practical for older people like me :-P
> There’s an impossible trade off between being “small” as in credit card sized and having a usable browser.
Kind of agree, but given the right phone I'd almost forget the browser on the phone and just use my laptop or carry a cheap tablet in my jacket for browsing.
My Series 4 just barely lasts all day with some activity (music, workout) and the phone at home all day (forcing use of the LTE when not at work or home.) Functionally, I would describe it as a pager, feature phone and iPod on the wrist.
The iPod has excellent battery life, and I've upgraded it with an iFlash SD adaptor. The iPhone 4S has a small screen, and removable battery on a Third Rail case.
I had a quick look last week after the iPhone SE was discontinued. The highest small-screen (3.5") resolution is the iPhone 4 display (960x640). It's even higher than newer phones, according to dpi.lv. The best Raspberry Pi screen is 320x640.
What we as hobbyists need is a 3.5" RPi touchscreen module with higher resolution. Then the iPod modding community can provide a case, and Seeed can provide a phone. The problem is, I couldn't find anybody manufacturing high-res small size touchscreens.
> I couldn't find anybody manufacturing high-res small size touchscreens.
RPi only supports 2 lanes of MIPI DSI interface, iPhone 4 screens (that are still manufactured and offered for $5-15 on aliexpress) use 4 lanes precisely because they are higher resolution.
No idea what the quality is like (probably not amazing), but the Chinese appear to still be making various rather small Android devices, including iPhone 4 clones.
Did you mean that it was the size of an iPod Nano (any gen except 6th)? Because a regular iPod Classic/iPod Touch is about the same size as an iPhone. But an iPod Nano would be an impressively small phone.
"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)
A little unfair to compare the Kin as failure purely on fashion accessory grounds? The device had some seriously ahead of its time cloud features, a few of which would still be interesting even today. Arguably its closest spiritual sibling was the Danger line of phones (Microsoft acquired Danger and had them work on the Kin) and those sold respectably.
I think there are many complex factors in the Kin’s failure (not the least of which was that Microsoft themselves weren’t really 100% behind the platform), but I personally wouldn’t put fashion near the top of the list. The kin hardware was serviceable at the time, but certainly wasn’t nearly as compromised by fashion concerns as some of the ridiculous Siemens Xelibri models were. The Xelibri 6 is frankly hilarious, and almost in a league of its own for bad fashion phone design.
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).
I had to make our software work on it, that was certainly not a fun experience... IIRC, the main issue with the Razr was memory though. JSR support often didn't mean much anyway, as many features were optional (probably intended for lack of hardware support, but phone vendors would abuse this to provide a minimal "let's just get that checkbox marked" API).
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.
Did you lose a bet or something? I can understand carrying a dumb phone that you like, but using a dumb phone that you absolutely hate? With so many options available...
Obviously I didn't know about about all this before I bought the phone. On paper it seemed like it would be a nice upgrade. I don't send 100's of texts, so I haven't been bothered to look for a different one.
What Nokia phone? I've been looking to get a Nokia 105 (2017) unlocked with the possibility of using it with Google's Project Fi (T-Mobile) but can't seem to find them anywhere - the only seller of them on Amazon in the US isn't reliable.
They are not the same. Even though Nokia is infamous for not being able to produce a solid smartphone platform that would actually attract app developers, their feature phones (and Sony Ericsson's, too) were always known for having more finished, polished and faster UX when compared to competition like Siemens and Motorola.
The Nokia-branded feature phones produced during Microsoft's ownership and ones produced currently by HMD Global are based on somewhat horrible generic Chinese feature phone platforms and lack the finish and localisation. HMD likes to call one of them Series 30+. Nokia's Series 30 is easy to use and reliable feature phone platform, Series 30+ is not.
Reviving the old 3310 got Nokia back into every store in Europe. It really doesn't matter whether those phones are any good or not, because they're not a priority, they're just a gimmick.
They're just a gimmick that's a complete win from a marketing side though. I know Nokia, I've seen their new feature phones everywhere, I've found out that they have sturdy, decent smartphones now (like the 7 plus) running Android One, and I've made three purchases from them this year.
Nokia was bought by a Chinese company who now produces the phones. In addition to having no reputation (good or bad) of quality at this point, the company seems to have remote access to modify the OS and apps installed.
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?
An interesting option is the Moto Z line with one of its external power pack accessories (in particular the Moto Z Play, which of the Moto Z line is the heaviest and the one with the biggest internal battery). The internal battery is not changeable, but the external power pack feels a lot like a changeable battery.
(Disclaimer: I have one, as do several of my friends and coworkers.)
I agree with you wrt the battery, but I would prefer to put an aftermarket case on a more fragile phone than to buy a rugged phone that supposedly doesn't need a case.
Both are going to be badly scratched up if dropped on or dragged across a rough surface. A cheap aftermarket case, though, is much easier to replace than the backside of a phone. In other words, a replaceable case has many of the same benefits as a replaceable battery.
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.
I'm not sure the comparison is that significant. We tend to omit two aspects when we deride price changes:
One is just inflation. No need to explain that. In 15 years at 3% annual inflation rates, the $500 becomes $780.
Second is that the product has changed, massively. The better comparison is to a flagship phone-only, which is $30. Or to compare the iPhone to a range of products, e.g. a phone, but also a television, a videocamera, photocamera, pocket-microphone, GPS tracker, mp3 player, navigation system, fitness tracker, and some kind of pocket computer that lets you browse the internet, read news, take notes etc. It's quite remarkably different from a phone, and we sort of have to thank Apple for this 'issue' in them calling it the iPhone and getting smartphones as a permanent product category. When really it's a computer first, phone second. Try selling an iPhone that can't do anything but make calls, then try selling an iPhone that has its call function disabled, the latter would outsell the former by a large margin.
A 32" inch flat panel TV costed in 2003 twice or triple what it costs today.
In 2003/2004 a Sony Ericsson P800 or P900 (among the first products that can be called "smartphone") costed more or less the same as an iPhone costs today.
Of course it applies, you're just describing the outcome of an even stronger effect counteracting inflation.
Inflation simply means an inflation of the money supply. If you give everyone 1 trillion dollars tomorrow, hypothetically speaking, prices of all electronics would surely go up.
Similarly, if there was no technological advancement in the past 20 years, prices of flatscreen TV's would also have gone up in nominal terms due to an increasing money supply.
Instead, technology moved much faster to lower production costs than an increase in the money supply increased nominal prices. Doesn't mean there was no inflation or that it magically didn't apply.
As for your example of a Sony Ericsson, did you miss half of my post where I explain it's an apples/oranges comparison, or that better smartphones than the P800 sell for $100 (like the Moto G5, infinitely more value than the P800).
Yeah, my P910i was pretty damn expensive back in the day. It showed the potential of smartphones, but never really materialized. I did have a 3rd party GPS app with external bluetooth GPS dongle - which worked pretty well, but the resistive touch-screen, memory limits, generic slowness, no WiFi, and lack of software updates and maintenance made it a "too soon" device.
That is just the absolute price. You still have the price increase of the inflation but it is off set by the decline in price form the production efficiency.
So you absolutely have to take in inflation calculations to any comparison.
Yep, my point was that - when it comes to electronics - the combination of fairly low inflation with economies due to mass production, competition, diffusion, efficiency or what not, results in a substantial deflation, i.e. a "same" or "comparable" electronic device tends after a few years to cost less (in absolute price).
The iPhone is an exception as the good Apple guys managed - one way or the other - to keep the price constant or nearly constant.
Of course it remains clear that - say - US$ 1,000 15 years ago were "more" than US$ 1,000 today.
In 2003, for most people, the flagship Razr cost £99, or nothing. You were paying £20 or £30 a month for mobile service in a contract that gave you a new phone every 12 months. No benefit or discount for not taking an upgrade when it was available.
Ok, but the new iPhone has a huge screen, great browser, email, 64gb ram, > a million apps, 40x the radio bands, 30x the resolution, 3x the battery, 100x the speed, video, and more.
Not only that, but it has replaced other devices. The modern flagship cell phone is a great value when you realized it replaces the digital P&S camera, the video recorder, the music player, and for some uses the computer.
Some more (sometimes incompletely): GPS devices, scanners, portable video players, E-readers, paper books, magazines, and newspapers, credit cards, voice recorders, business cards, portable video game systems.
Of course, a brand new flagship isn't necessary to perform all these functions. The 2016 model Sony I bought used for $200 in 2017 is capable of doing all these things. It even has removable storage, a headphone jack, and a dedicated camera button (all lacking on most flagships). Flagships are luxury items or fashion accessories, and they're still a good value relative to other luxury items.
In 1996 Motorola's StarTAC phone cost $1,000. It was the world's smallest commercially available cellphone, and was the first ever clamshell/flip mobile phone. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarTAC
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.
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.
Actually the “close the phone to close the call” is the most dangerous feature in history...
It didn’t actually close the call in the worst possible moments.
Well, if there was a malfunction, that could happen - but so it can happen with current phones (I regularly get calls where people think they hang up but the call continues).
>“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
I'd say the Nokia 8210 from 1999 is a better contender. Very design-focussed, launched at Paris Fashion Week. Has to be among the smallest candybar phones made too. A much better phone than the RAZR.
I owned 2 of those and still miss them. I tried buying one off eBay a while ago (wow, that's about 7 years ago now) but the battery just didn't last and very soon the screen got dead pixel lines and the antenna malfunctioned - I suspect maybe some components had been replaced with knock-offs or something, it was very un-Nokialike.
8210 was incredibly popular, and desireable at the same time, although it was release quite a few years ahead of Motorola. I’d buy one now if I could find a NOS somewhere.
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.
The razr still works fine (on tmobile). I still use mine, purchased in 2005, no issues. Battery life isn't great and it's hard to find a replacement battery that works, but it still gets me through the day.
I wouldn't necessarily mind upgrading, but the razor is less than 4"x2" and there is nothing else like it available. I have no interest in a larger bulkier phone.
Closer to the Razr (no palmos) was the Samsung A900. Just a dumb flip phone, but very solid and tiny. I miss small phones. I really don't want a 6" megolith to haul around.
Not quite "tiny," but pretty small regardless, the Xperia Compact line of phones is still a thing. You should check it out. A new Z5C can be had for about 150 USD, or 500 USD for an XZ2C if you can live with 5 inches. Sadly, it's not clear whether Sony will be releasing an XZ3C, so we may be coming to the end of what is arguably the only serious high-end compact smartphone out there.
iPhone SE is still supported by Apple and smaller still, and the Performance on iOS 12 is respectable. Probably not as cheap as $150 but it can’t be far off.
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.
Funnily enough I had an older sibling to this line of "nearly" smartphones, the RIZR Z8 which came out a year before the RAZR V9.
It was Symbian powered, had an ARM CPU and a PowerVR GPU - that's a common pairing now but back then was still fairly rare.
Thing it has in common with the RAZR V9 was the lack of headphone jack, but it did come with a pair of stereo bluetooth headphones. Again, Motorola were way ahead of their time in a lot of ways.
I really loved that phone, I grabbed it when my Nokia N81 died (that was a piece of crap like all the Nokia Symbian phones). Had a great battery life and awesome call quality. It was the last phone I had before the first iPhone launched.
I seem to remember the advertisement for it had a link to the Jason Bourne films.
You may be right, and I may be mixing up between the two. They looked identical aside from software menus. I know I had one and the wife the other thanks to being on different networks.
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 bought mine from the Verizon store and I swear they sold me a Chinese version. The build quality was the worse. All the keys fell off eventually and the metal color paint peeled off as well. I promised myself never to buy anything Motorola after that.
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.
I used an old-style phone a few years back. Some things I had forgotten about:
- syncing contacts to the phone is near impossible
- typing on t9 is slowwwww
- setting up MMS etc is a PITA
- no apps even for things like driving directions, simple web searches, voice recordings, Spotify
Can you not copy contacts to Sim and then copy to the new phone? I remember doing that with multiple dummy phones before I bought my first smart phone.
I bought one for my mum. It's not bad. When I bought it was one of the last ones and the guy in the store said they sell out regularly. It's popular with older folks.
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 had a similar situation recently with the mini USB port broken for anything but charging. I recall trying bluetooth and running into trouble, but then succeeding using a data-only SIM card (T-Mobile) and emailing the photos.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, the Razr was my first phone...but it was super convenient to just use the number pad to dial. I had contacts programmed in for just about all the people I called, but between favorites and dialing I didn't use them all that often.
Each number key has three letters associated with it. So you hit the numbers that correspond to the letters in the name; presumably the phone would display a list of all the contacts that matched - with the example of typing 666 to get “Mom”, first you’d see every contact whose first letter was M, N, or O, then every contact whose second letter was also on the 6 key, and so on until you were down to one and hit the dial button.
The primary mode of input was via a d-pad that was fairly small to allow room for the number pad, which is largely defunct after the initial creation of a contact.
I think what they were getting at was that dedicating space to a number pad isn't the most functional design by today's standards.
I barely remember the OS on my old V3 but at a guess I'd imagine actually accessing contacts was sufficiently laborious that just memorising numbers was more convenient?
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