The Verge's retrospective on the Motorola Razr, the phone of the 2000s, is well-designed and sharp on the eyes. Just like the handset.
I was 11 years old when the Razr launched and probably among the first generation of kiddies that begged their parents to buy them a cellphone. We weren't really the target demographic before that — cellphones had mostly been bulky, boring things primarily for working adults. SMS texting had just become something that everyone did day-to-day, and mobile data, while available on many models, was too expensive and slow to even take into consideration. The only "flippable" tech I cared about until that point was the Game Boy Advance SP.
But the Razr had something that other handsets had mostly neglected: it was hot. The design innovatively revitalized Y2K Futurism pop culture and is even now fondly remembered as a figurehead for the "Chromecore" and "McBling" aesthetics. It seemingly prioritized fashion over function, and that felt desirably fresh compared to the typical blobs of chunky plastic that had become commonplace (looking at you, Nokia 1100). Motorola's former head of design, Jim Wicks, once told The Verge that the company had intentionally set out to create something that "would cut against everything everyone else was doing with handsets at the time."
There's a twist ending that really appeals to me: the writer, Jess Weatherbed, never got to own one before smartphones came along to make them obsolete. The Razr, then, becomes an avatar of technological hiraeth or saudade, directed at a time and place one grew into but whose time was passing.
