After introducing the flip phone to the masses, and more than 15 years since the first Razr took the world by storm, Motorola has rebooted its icon for a new generation

1996 was a hell of a year. Britpop was at its peak, with Oasis playing to 250,000 people over two rowdy nights at Knebworth House in Hertfordshire; at the pictures, Trainspotting had everybody hooked and proved British cinema could go toe-to-toe with the Hollywood big boys; and at Wembley, England came closer than ever to finally bringing football home.

It was also a year of some significant endings - Take That split up, and Charles and Diana got divorced - but there were new beginnings too. The radio waves carried the sounds of the Spice Girls’ first single, Wannabe; Dolly the sheep became the planet’s first cloned mammal; and in January, a new era began at Motorola with the launch of the StarTAC - the world’s first clamshell mobile phone.

It’s easy to forget that, until the StarTAC came along, mobile phones were not neat, pocket-friendly devices - they were clunky, unwieldy things with huge antennas and chunky keypads. But the StarTAC set Motorola - and the tech industry as a whole - on a path towards a world where your choice of phone was as much a fashion statement as a way of keeping in touch.

Of course, it wasn’t just Motorola making a new start in 1996. That November also saw the first issue of Stuff hit the shelves - and it’s hard to think of a pair that are better suited. Since the beginning, we’ve had a passion for gadgets that combine innovative thinking with gotta-have-it desirability… and one that encapsulates that ethos better than any other is the original Motorola Razr.

Fold-school: the Motorola StarTAC was the original clamshell king

No sacrifice

While the trend among phones in recent years has been for bigger screens and more capable cameras, in the early ’00s it was all about shrinkage. Back then, mobiles were for calling and texting and not much more, so manufacturers focused all of their efforts on making them as slim and pocketable as possible - and the original Razr, which had people queuing up outside shops in 2004, absolutely nailed it.