Motorola RAZR V3

Status: 🟢 Fully functional

Even if you spent the beginning of the third millennium living in an underground bunker, you either saw or heard about the Motorola RAZR V3 mobile phone. This flip phone is an icon of its time, a symbol of technological and design progress. Elegant futurism are the words I would use to describe the unique style of this device. It combined everything: an incredible thinness for its time, setting a trend for slim devices for years to come, high-quality materials, and an amazing keyboard with a gentle blue backlight that looked like a piece of alien art. It’s no wonder that the Motorola RAZR V3 became one of the most mass-produced mobile phones in history. Finding it on the secondary market even now, 20 years later (at the time of writing), is not difficult, and any collection would certainly benefit from such an addition.

From a technical standpoint, this flip phone lagged behind even its contemporaries. I viewed the RAZR V3 with great skepticism since I already had a Motorola E398, which was similar in many ways but additionally equipped with stereo speakers and a memory card slot. The built-in storage volume for both models was 5.5 megabytes, which was laughably small even then. However, my phone came with a TransFlash card (the former name for MicroSD) of 512 megabytes, which was quite impressive. The superstition about the display cables quickly wearing out due to mechanical stress didn’t help either, although my twenty-year-old model from my collection is still in perfect condition even after a somewhat clumsy body transplant. Moreover, due to their price, size, and appearance, flip phones were often perceived as a fashion accessory, beloved by girls. After the successful expansion of Samsung and Nokia, boys began to prefer sliders, but we will discuss this later on other pages.

The software of the Motorola RAZR V3 was the old, reliable, and sometimes quite tiresome P2K platform. This meant that the phone could be connected to a computer without much trouble (if you had the right drivers) to upload entertainment content such as ringtones, pictures, and themes. You could also increase the initial volume of the multimedia speaker if you wished. We didn’t risk installing custom firmware: this phone, unlike the Motorola E398 and similar models, had a standard Mini USB port and a locked bootloader, making it very difficult to restore the phone in case of a failed operation. Accessing the test point required drilling a hole in one of the metal covers of the motherboard, which concealed all the intimate details of the built-in electronics. It was clear that no student would dare damage a device worth more than $500, so we made do with what we could.

I haven’t handled many Motorola RAZR V3 phones, but every time was a tactile celebration. Many people had the false impression that the keyboard was touch-sensitive, mainly due to the flip phone’s thinness, but that was not the case. The springy tactile feedback of the keyboard is the second thing anyone who is lucky enough to hold this phone notices, after the matte aluminum and the unearthly blue backlight of the etched tracks. Within a year, almost all mobile phone manufacturers started making copies of the RAZR V3. Even the then-giant Nokia bet on thinness, the keyboard, and even the signature “chin” of the RAZR. Unfortunately, the success of this model was detrimental to Motorola Mobility: in all subsequent releases, a particular emphasis was placed on design, leaving other important user parameters behind. I remain loyal to the brand to this day; Motorola still (in 2024) releases competitive models in the RAZR series, but it is no longer the same Motorola as before. However, this does not bother me in the least: in the end, the phones turn out to be good and quite open to modding.