Motorola's Razr design daddy legs it, gets inside Intel Roger Jellicoe, the veteran engineer behind Motorola’s greatest hits – the MicroTAC, StarTAC and Razr – has joined Intel as a vice president at the newly formed Devices R&D team within its Mobile Communication Group (MCG). It's an awesome coup for Intel, and a loss for Google, after mass redundancies signalled the Chocolate …
He made a great design. Even more of a shame was that the entire company rested on their laurels for about 5+ years after that, chopping away at the workforce 10% at a time (reducing from 150K to waay less than that). That CEO (Ed Zander) joined minutes before the RAZR launch, and did nothing during his tenure to generate any new phones beyond "more RAZRs". Look where it go them...
Helicopter icon used for leaving the Moto-mothership...
The OK and Cancel buttons were on opposite sides of the keypad to the same concepts on my Nokia that I had before it, so I cancelled a lot of stuff after I changed over.
That said, it was a marvel. It was thin even when doubled in thickness by being folded, but it never felt flexy when open. And because it wasn't exactly tiny when folded, it was a sane size when open.
And I had the weirdest experience when I bought it. I went into a Vodafone shop, and told them that I wanted one of those (pointing to a non-RAZR Moto phone). Ah, sir, we don't have any of those, but you might like this one (pointing to a pink RAZR).
I'm usually reasonably open-minded about stuff, but a pink phone is going too far (Steve the Cynic is Stephen, not Stephanie, OK?), "I'm not buying a pink phone." He looked a bit nonplussed, but the salesman in him recovered quickly, "Ah, yes, we have that in charcoal grey as well. I'll go out back to get one for you."
IIRC the OK/Cancel button locations wasn't even consistently deployed across the Moto phone range - caught me out a few times. A quick trip down memory lane on Google images shows the old v500 clamshell with the green on the right, red on the left, and then the later SLVR/RAZR/PEBL models with them reversed.
Maybe it was a "differentiating feature"?
Motorola were never good at design. I hate the look of their phones. They just are not as elegant as Apple or HTC (Samsung is content to copy a generation old iphone design) phones. And no Android based Motorola products were outstanding. They don't have a real superphone to compete with HTC, Samsung or Apple yet. A tip for Motorola: Start with dreaming up a phone that you would love to have two years down the line, and start designing from there. Else, stay two years behind the rest.
Thanks for this great article !. Did not know that mr. Roger Jellicoe was the great mind behind the beautiful RAZR phones that I love for years now.
It may be too early to pronounce Moto dead. Current products like the RAZR MAXX are great. Speed, pricing, design, battery life and screen make some other products look like they were plucked from the tree ages ago.
Even the original RAZR V3 from 2007, that I use daily, is still doing well. Battery lasts a week, usb and email allow simple data transfer.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
