When it was released, the Razr seemed almost freakishly wide. Even though it was no wider than a modern smartphone of today, subjects in Motorola’s focus groups reported not wanting a phone with such an expansive X dimension. There were people saying, ‘Let’s kill it!’” Such stringent design requirements meant completely reassessing the cellphone’s form factor. This thing had to be thin, but it also had to be extraordinarily usable. “No compromises,” became a secondary mantra. A second, external screen should let you check the time and preview calls before answering them. The screen had to be big, too, for early internet browsing and some of the first downloadable games. The company knew from global ethnographic research that, while America was lagging, people were using phones differently. “We didn’t want to make a new years later.” “Within, what we talked about is we didn’t want to make a retro device,” recalls Pierce. People were excited to see the 10mm model internally-and yet, it felt wrong. The designers mocked up a reference model that’s been lost to time, but Pierce describes a device with flared knuckles and a sloped chin. The team’s first thought was to build something like a StarTAC 2. Building the first cellphone of a new era It was built for calling in a world leaning toward multimedia.

But this phone was seven years old and had ceased to woo the market. Holding it in my hands at Motorola’s Chicago headquarters, the minimal, charcoal black flip phone is impossibly light and impressively thin-even by today’s standards. The year was 2003, and Motorola was planning a successor to its popular StarTAC phone, first released in 1996.

It had single-handedly dominated the global cellphone market before Nokia surpassed it in 1998. Motorola had built the world’s first cellphone in the 1970s, an influential 32-bit processor that would revolutionize computing at companies like Apple in the 1980s, and the radio towers that enabled the mobile revolution in the 1990s. company with a design team working out of Libertyville, Illinois-a small, remote suburb of Chicago with a main street that’s every bit as Americana as the name implies.

Motorola programming primer