(phone buzzing) (suspenseful music)
- Uh-huh, I think the alien egg is hatching. (chuckles)
(suspenseful music)
Imagine sitting down to breakfast
with one of the biggest companies in the world
and being told this,
"We need to do something bold,
something nobody expects.
I will give you budget, personnel,
marketing, products, prices, and distribution.
All I want from you is to go out and change the world."
(upbeat music)
The year was 2002.
The place was Munich's Hotel Bayerischer Hof,
and the man with the sweet 'stache was Rudi Lamprecht
of German tech giant, Siemens,
whose mobile division was, at the time,
the world's fourth largest cell phone maker.
The man on the other side of the table was George Appling,
an American consultant whose acceptance
of that offer would lead to what he once called,
"The greatest job imaginable."
Appling's team would go on to build a family
of cell phones unlike any the world had yet seen,
promoted by a set of commercials,
the likes of which I hope never to see again.
But just two years later, this journey
into tomorrow would be cut short.
And a year after that,
with its phone division losing 1.5 million euros per day,
Siemens abandoned a 20 year legacy
and left the mobile space entirely.
This is the story of Xelibri.
(upbeat music)
Yep, it's really pronounced that way.
And no, Xelibri doesn't seem to mean anything.
What's more important is what it's not.
While Siemens was, and is,
a mammoth German conglomerate
respected for its tech prowess,
the effort it would take to parlay that reputation
into something that resonated with fashion buyers
was thought to be tougher than just starting from scratch.
So, much like BBK Electronics would spawn
the hip OnePlus brand over a decade later,
Siemens incubated Xelibri as a kind of in-house start-up
with over 40 employees working
on its fashion focused phones by the end of 2002.
Why fashion?
Well, think about the world Xelibri was entering.
Just after the turn of the century,
the mobile landscape was in the midst of a dramatic shift
from the utilitarian, expensive, kinda clunky handsets
of the late '90s to the smaller, more affordable,
and more attractive cell phone of the early '00s.
This was the era of the Motorola V60,
the Samsung A500, the Ericsson T68,
phones small and attractive enough
that they started to become status symbols.
Xelibri leaned hard into that shift,
veering away from traditional phones
of the type Siemens had always sold
toward a future of chic accessories
that just happened to make phone calls.
The best way to illustrate that is to show you some
of the very rare samples that made this video possible.
These come to me on loan from friend
of the channel, Valentinos,
who managed to chase down four of the eight phones
Xelibri would eventually release in its first,
and only, full year on the market.
Just so you can get an idea of how weird
these phones really were,
take a look at a Siemens' handset typical of the period.
While the SL56 is attractive and absolutely tiny,
even by the standards of the time,
it's also fairly conventional.
You know, screen, control collective, sliding keypad.
Next to that, the Xelibri 2 looks
like a prop from 2001's "Star Trek: Enterprise,"
its integrated belt clip ensuring
that you could show it off even if your Vulcan jumpsuit
didn't have any pockets.
The Trek connection is actually legit here.
The phone's internal nickname was apparently,
Alien Beauty, and Xelibri's whole first collection
of four phones was named Space on Earth,
in an apparent nod to George Appling's trekkie roots.
But that collection wasn't launched
at a "Star Trek" convention.
It debuted at a splashy London Fashion Week party
in February, 2003, with a 450 flat-screen stage,
a production crew of 55,
a helicopter, and an invite list of 1,300
that included Boy George and Christina Aguilera.
Alongside the alien beauty that I have here,
there was The Retro-Futuristic Classic, The Dark Hero,
and something extremely rare for the time,
a phone with no keypad, worn around the neck,
and controlled almost entirely by voice.
The collection went on sale later that spring,
not on shelves and pedestrian phone shops, no,
but alongside jewelry cases in department stores,
a high profile launch befitting a high concept product
with a fairly high price to match,
between 230 and $360 unlocked.
(calm music)
Now it's not clear exactly when Siemens realized
it had a problem on its hands, but my guess
would be fairly shortly after launch.
Reviews from the period are almost impossible to find
because Xelibri only launched in a handful of markets,
but what user experiences are still out there on the web
are almost uniformly negative.
Xelibri had the same problem Nokia
did during the same period.
If you wanted unusual designs,
you had to settle for unusual keyboards,
and in the heyday of SMS text messaging,
changing your keypad to something that obliterates
the user's muscle memory, that's just a horrible idea.
What's more, these are seriously
some of the worst keys I've touched.
They're tiny,
there's almost no travel or feedback,
and you need to press so hard that it almost hurts to type.
To make matters worse,
the Xelibri 2's software is sluggish,
even though all it has to drive
is a 101 x 65, black and white display.
In an era when color screens like Samsung's
were the new hotness, this panel
looks like the same one from the Nokia 3310
launched almost three years prior.
All the phones in the first collection
used a common reference design.
So with all of 'em, you could count out data features,
IR, Bluetooth, MMS, none of that was there.
And the worst sin of all, they felt cheap.
The Xelibri 2's creaky, lightweight build
is totally outclassed by its contemporaries,
even those from Siemens itself.
(chuckling ) This actually hurts.
Really, the only bright point I could find
in this thing was the ringtone library.
(bouncy music)
Xelibri took a different approach
with its fall/winter collection,
another batch of four phones released
in October, 2003, under the banner Fashion Extravaganza.
Interestingly, the work of designing this collection
was outsourced to a firm called IDEO,
which counts among its achievements
one of Apple's first mouse designs.
As you might expect,
this second collection got even wilder casings
to go with new color screens,
which made it possible to squeeze a little more fun
into the phones in the form
of these little (chuckling) animated bitmaps
you could send in the early MMS days.
Look at these kind of Proto Animojis.
I am sad. I am confused.
(chuckling) I'd use these today. It's great.
Anyway, Xelibri was still big
on pushing the wearable concept
so the 5 came with a keypad guard
that latched into a lanyard so you could wear
it around your neck.
Meanwhile, the 7 looks like a normal phone
until you turn it sideways to reveal
it's actually from cartoon world.
Yeah, I always thought this
was some kind of folding clamshell
when I saw it in pictures,
but really it's just shaped like this so you
can clip it onto a pocket or purse.
I don't have the 8, but it appears
to be a peanut-shaped follow-on to the Xelibri 3 pendant.
And the most distinctive of the whole lineup is perhaps
the most lampoon of all early '00 cell phones,
the Xelibri 6.
God. Can you imagine?
Question. Is that a makeup compact or is it a phone?
Answer. Why not both?
Ugh, combining the horrible keyboard
of the two with the cheap construction of,
well, all of them, the Xelibri 6 didn't need a competitor
to showcase its shortcomings,
but Panasonic built one anyway.
I had to snap this up when Valentinos linked me
to the eBay auction.
The Panasonic G70 of 2003 had the web browser,
higher res display,
and cover display the Xelibri 6 lacked,
in a much smaller casing
that traded the embarrassment of a compact look-alike
for that of a birth control (chuckles) pill box look-alike.
Look, I actually like this form factor.
As a kid, I loved Pinky's magic compact
on "The Noozles," and the Turtlecom from "TMNT,"
just like the kids of 2001 loved the Compowder
from "Totally Spies!"
But these were supposed to be phones for adults,
discerning, high-powered adults, who watched cable TV.
(speakers whirring)
(dance music)
(girl screaming)
- [Mother] Police!
- [Michael] In an interview with "Campaign" at the time,
Xelibri's Vice President of Marketing said,
"We knew our communication
had to be as provocative as our phones."
(chuckles) Well, between the ad designed by Mother London
and the one directed by David Fincher,
I'd say, "Mission accomplished."
When all was said and done though,
no amount of provocation could provoke enough people
to pick up an Xelibri.
By the end of 2003,
the division made up less than 2%
of Siemens' total handset sales, about 720,000 units.
Accordingly, they were subjected to massive markdowns
in an effort to move inventory,
the last of whatever sheen that may have remained completely
fading away when they were dumped from chic boutiques
to bargain bins at discount supermarkets.
And in May of 2004, Siemens pulled the plug
on the whole Xelibri experiment.
It was a bloody nose for the company that kicked
off the millennium saying it wanted
to take over the cell phone world.
And for reasons unrelated to Xelibri,
the situation would only get worse.
A year later, with its mobile division
losing 1.5 million euros per day,
Siemens would sell the whole phone business to BenQ,
where it met its final, inevitable end in 2007.
It's easy to look back with perfect hindsight
and point out all the places Xelibri went wrong,
but in research for this video,
I was surprised at how much foresight the folks
behind this brand actually had.
While today's phones are too big to serve
as fashion accessories, wearable tech
has become a fully realized category unto itself.
Xelibri also correctly predicted
that people would someday buy phones unlocked
in more markets than just Europe,
and carry different phones for different situations,
opening an opportunity for manufacturers
to try to accelerate the phone upgrade cycle,
and phones did, in fact, become the status symbols
Xelibri wanted them to be,
with collaborations between manufacturers
and designers now common.
But my favorite thing that anyone got right
from this whole story belongs to George Appling,
the consultant whom Siemens recruited
to build Xelibri in the first place.
As he told "OutSmart Magazine,"
"When I was 35, I wrote, 'Stop,'
far ahead in my calendar on the day I would turn 40.
The notation was to remind me to finally stop working
for other people and do something that I love."
Appling took his own advice.
He would go on to cofound the Sherwood Forest Faire,
east of Austin, Texas, fulfilling a lifelong goal
of merging his business background and personal passion.
For the rest of us, still obsessing
over 18 year old cell phones,
the takeaway is complicated.
You could say that all the bold choices
we bored phone reviewers call on manufacturers to make
have, in many cases, already been made.
And the cost has often been higher than the reward.
But failure is almost always a combination of factors.
And while Xelibri definitely made plenty
of its own missteps,
I tend to think that the parent company Siemens
is largely to blame for its own situation.
And after all, you don't just go from
one of the biggest phone makers in the world
to selling off a money losing business that quickly
without a lot of fundamental issues.
Maybe that's a history I'll plumb another day.
For now, I'm glad I finally got to learn about Xelibri,
maker of some of the weirdest handhelds ever made,
from an era when Animoijis were 8-bit,
Christina Aguilera headlined tech parties,
and phones were fun.
(happy music)
Thanks again to Valentinos for the dedication and patience
it took to corral all these devices
and loan them out to me,
and to an incredibly detailed report
from SlashData that documents much of Xelibri's history.
That, along with all of my extensive source material,
is linked below.
And if you have your own memories
or experiences with Xelibri devices,
please share them in the comments below,
and subscribe so you don't miss the next episode
of "When Phones Were Fun."
Until next time, thanks for watching.
And if you can't stay home, remember to stay safe.
Mask up while you stay mobile my friends.
(upbeat music)