The Secret History of the Motorola Razr, the First Great Phone of the Millennium
Members of the original Razr design team recount making one of the most influential pieces of hardware ever
By Mark Wilson
“I’ll be honest, and this is a funny story to tell. Initially in design, we didn’t want the chin.”
Today, Paul Pierce is a distinguished designer at Motorola. But 15 years ago, he was on the original design team of the Razr — the impossibly thin phone that would go on to change everything — and he wasn’t so sure about how it was shaping up. Specifically, he wasn’t sure about that big chin.
Before the Razr was released in 2004, phones had evolved into chunks of expensive plastic. Whether it was the Nokia 3310 candy bar or some silver-sprayed clamshell phone from Sanyo or Samsung, the devices were positioned as functional technologies. And as technology evolved — with the introduction of bigger, color screens and cameras — they kept getting thicker. Breakthroughs from Finland, Japan, and Korea were slowly pushing us in the direction of giant devices that barely squeezed into a pocket. (Sound familiar?)
And then there was Motorola. A U.S. company with a design team working out of Libertyville, Illinois — a small, remote…
