Motorola StarTAC Review

Nobody had folded a phone before. Motorola released the StarTAC on January 3, 1996 at 1,000 dollars, and what people paid for was the 88 gram weight and the way it shut over the keypad, so that for the first time a phone rode in a shirt pocket or on a belt clip without announcing itself. The engineering was in the packaging: an analog AMPS handset with a segmented LED readout on the flip, a vibrate alert instead of a ring, the option of a lithium-ion cell when almost everything else still ran on nickel-metal-hydride, and a second battery that clipped piggyback onto the first when the slim one ran short, which it did.

Judged axis by axis it is mostly a C phone. The display showed the number you were dialling, a signal bar and little else; the menus were Motorola's usual code-driven maze; battery life on the standard pack was the compromise the shape demanded; there was no camera and the year did not expect one. None of that is what the StarTAC was for. It sold around 60 million units across the analog original and the GSM and CDMA versions that followed, it was the status object of the late 1990s, and every flip phone for the next ten years, up to Motorola's own RAZR, was a StarTAC with more inside. One S on this page, for the fold.