Motorola RAZR² V8

Status: 🟡 Minor housing issues

Another trip down memory lane: the year was 2007, and we were making our first clumsy attempts to earn some cash. We delivered newspapers, handed out flyers, and some even tried to get jobs at the university library. Then we realized all of that was useless nonsense—it was time to make some real money.

I got a gig as an office runner at a local telecom company, while my classmates took different paths—some became waiters in restaurants, others even worked as croupiers. The job was tough, even dangerous: night shifts, rowdy customers who might punch you in the face. But the money made it all worth it—on a good night, you could easily rake in up to a grand in tips.

Then one day, a buddy of mine shows up, hands me a cloth pouch with my favorite logo on it, and asks me to open it.

I hold this shimmering, mercury-like masterpiece in my hands and blurt out the only possible reaction: “Are you out of your damn mind?!”

No joke, this phone cost around a thousand bucks at the time. I had no idea that in just eight months, gray-market iPhones would be selling for five grand with ease. The RAZR2 V8 was absolutely gorgeous, but it was more of a style statement than a practical device: weak battery, only 512MB of internal storage, and a massive external display with three capacitive touch buttons. Even back then, my music library wouldn’t have fit on it, so my classmate’s decision to buy the V8 seemed odd to me. But maybe that’s exactly why it stuck in my memory.

By the way, the V8 also ran on Linux, and it got its fair share of modifications—after a complicated bootloader unlock, you could modify the root filesystem, install third-party apps like MPlayer, Rockbox, and various emulators. Someone even tried porting Android to it… with no success.