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The line between form and function just became razor thin.
The Motorola RAZR, only from the new Cingular.
I still have people to this day that tell me, they remember when it came out, and what they were willing to give up to get a RAZR.
It was something that people just had to have.
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Really became kind of a cultural thing.
It became something everyone saw.
My name is Paul Pearce, at the time of development of Razr, I was the design director for product design, focused on the development of the Razr product.
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At the time you saw cellphones went into bags because they were thick and kind of unmanageable.
This was one of the first ones we saw sliding in the pockets even skinny jeans and thin pockets.
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Hi.
We got started in 2002.
And a couple things happened and converged at that time.
This chipset allowed us to get the circuit board and the batter into the same plane, so instantly we lopped off a big portion of the thickness of the overall device.
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For us, the inspiration was really around the idea of StarTAC, and this notion of ten millimeters.
We had created a prototype of a ten millimeter clam phone, And, I think, all of us reacted the same way when we saw it.
It was like, man, this is pretty unbelievable, look at the breakthrough.
At the end of the day, Razr, I believe, has ended up, I believe, at 13.9 millimeters.
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It allowed for an emotional connection with users.
It allowed for an experience that resonated and stayed with you.
We hoped it would be something you would then take and share with a friend.
And you see that primarily manifested in the keypad.
Hi, I'm Kent German, senior editor here at Cnet.com.
Today we're gonna take a first look at the Motorla Razr V3c.
And down here on the navigation keys, like the original Razr, they are flat with the surface of the phone, and they almost resemble a touchpad.
What you're looking at is just some of the very early prototypes.
And if you notice Like the design here, this is different than where the final design you can tell by the cut-out shape, this was one of the earliest prototypes.
In the end this was like the production keyboard that we ended up with just getting the silicone in the gaps at the proper height, making that work Getting this fun metal finish on the keypad was really difficult.
I want it to be all pink and I'd like to figure out how to make the key pad pink, this is a brass and nickel approach to the key pad, we didn't have the ability at the time to get the color into it.
But as you can see on the prototype, we were looking at trying to understand how to get more of a unified color approach.
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When you used to text, you used to hit one key multiple times.
And you'd move around the keyboard.
So the idea of holding something really thin and trying to manipulate the keyboard to make that work.
Wasn't as easy to do as when we added the volume of the chin and it enabled you to hold on to it.
That was one of the things I think we like to share is from design we were dead set against the chin but.
It became really well understood as this was fundamentally better for the user, and in the end it became a very iconic element of design.
It was intended to be a relatively low volume, high price product so we thought that might limit some of the audience it might get to.
But once it hit, once we saw the reaction, it became something that people had to have.
None of us probably understood exactly how iconic it was going to be.
You look at kinda the progression and timeline, this is really first generation, this maybe 1.25 again it came out relatively close at the time of launch, but again camera variation This we started to extend some software functions.
We started to extend a few of the things with CMF.
We made variations.
And then this is what we had called Razor 2 at the time.
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Hey it's Rich DeMuro with cnet.com at the Motorola Mobile Experience in New York City where they've announced.
The successor to the Razr, the Razr 2. First off, you have a bright two inch screen on the outside.
I personally believe we spent a little too much time riding the Razr.
It was something that we started to do too many refreshes, we started to do things, I felt like we held on to it a little too long.
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When people ask me about it I don't typically tell people I was a part of that, my mother likes to tell people I'm part of that team, recently people share memories the first time they sold it in fact if they had one, they have multiple ones.
And that honestly makes me feel good that it was something that still stands out.
People remember it, talk about it.
I think people are kinda yearning for and remembering back to that Razer when it flipped open and the sound of that, the feel of that.
Where is that today?
And it seems like an opportunity.
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