- [Michael] February of 2007 wasn't the best month
for movie releases, but it was a great time
for new horizons.
And I don't just mean the space probe.
Fresh off the high of the legendary Razr,
Motorola was trying new things with cell phones.
And the result was a bizarre little handheld
I instantly wanted to own.
Nine years later, I finally have one,
and I can't stop playing with it.
I'm Michael Fisher, and this is the MrMobile
retro review of the Motorola Rizr Z8.
(techno music)
The first thing that hits you about the Z8 is,
well, like Scotty says.
- [Scotty] All I can say is they don't make them
like they used to.
- [Michael] Sure, you can still buy a feature phone today
if you don't want or need a smartphone.
And some even come with cool functions,
like WiFi and mobile hotspot.
But the Z8 hails from a time when most phones
were feature phones, so to stand out,
you needed to dress to impress,
and it certainly did.
Even the packaging bears the hallmarks of a lost era.
In 2007, as today, a Bourne film was hitting theaters,
but Motorola took the tie-ins to a whole new level.
Along with the Z8 and its charger,
you got a dedicated data cable,
custom earbuds, Bluetooth headphones,
sync software on a CD ROM, remember those?
And a 512 megabyte microSD card.
But not just any card, this one had the full length
Bourne Identity movie preloaded on it.
Companies knew how to do special edition back then.
Even without all that stuff, the Z8 was something special.
We'd seen sliders before in the Samsung A800
and Motorizr Z6, among others, but this was different.
The clever kick slide hinge around back
meant that when you slid the keyboard out,
you didn't just have a slightly taller phone,
you had a, well, you know.
♫ Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring
♫ Banana phone
- [Michael] And this thing is, this wasn't just a gimmick.
Remember, in 2007, most people still used
voice calling first and texting second.
So it made sense to build a phone that conformed
to your face when you were talking on it,
and folded flat when you wanted to take in a film
on that glorious 2.2 inch screen.
Now it's easy to make jabs at that small display,
or the low res camera, or the laggy UIQ software.
After all, this phone is effectively ancient.
But to me, it's more interesting to see
the old ideas that worked well,
some of which we've sacrificed in the move to smartphones.
For example, the Z8 has extra buttons
that serve as shortcuts to the camera and the media player.
And they're real time savers.
Most modern smartphones are roughly eleventy-million
times bigger, yet have no shortcut keys to speak of.
Other features have come along, in spirit.
The Z8 let you switch between back and front cameras
with the slider, while today's Moto Z
lets you do it with a gesture.
But my time with the Z8 has taught me
that the biggest thing we've lost has been panache.
Look at most modern smartphones,
and you see fairly common slabs
that with each passing year look more and more alike.
The Z8 is from an era where eye-catching hardware
mattered a lot, and it totally shows.
The soft touch casing with the reflective back plate.
The jet black paint job with the neon green accents.
That iconic hinge,
and a box packed full of accessories.
It all adds up to a cell phone with swagger,
and that's something today's mobile landscape
could really use more of.
Now if all this talk of classic communicators
has your dumb phone nostalgia rising,
and you think you might try reverting
to a feature phone yourself, think again.
My friend Erica Griffin,
aka The Technology Nerd Who Likes to Film Stuff,
recently tried to dump her smart phone for an extended run,
and well, here's how that went.
- [Erica] Hey everyone, well, I did it.
And it was horrible.
A week with the Verizon LG Exalt II,
a modern flip phone, but not without realizing
that I have a bit of an instant gratification addiction,
and I think that most of this young tech generation
does as well.
I can't disappear from Internet-land these days
without someone thinking I am dead.
I can't forget to text back a loved one
without amassing major concern.
So my idea of disconnecting couldn't work
even if I wanted it to, so I'm not addicted to
my smart phone per se, but addicted to instant
convenient access to my information, my virtual network
of peoples, and to whether I am missing out on something.
My work is even online, the irony.
My flip phone has unlimited access to mobile web,
but it was poor at best access when I needed,
or it just wasn't capable.
I found myself clinging to my laptop.
In another time, I think this flip phone
would've been awesome, with its long battery life,
big colorful display, front concealed notification LEDs,
ability to pop in a high capacity SD card,
and mount the storage to my computer,
and legacy ability to tap into Verizon's dial-up networking.
But of course that no longer works.
But all this misery cost me 30 bucks.
I'd be better off simply paying for a low-end smartphone.
I feel that flip phones are still useful
for the right person, but I have changed.
- [Michael] Haven't we all?
Again, that's Erica Griffin,
The Technology Nerd Who Likes to Film Stuff.
I'll drop a link to her channel in the description below,
and you can follow her on Twitter, @IAM_ERICA.
And hey, whether you're setting out
on a dumb phone challenge of your own,
or you're just full of fond memories
of that one gadget you wish you could go home to again,
I wanna know about it.
Drop your story in the comments below, or anywhere else
MrMobile hangs out in the social sphere.
We'll talk about the past, and get a little melancholy.
It'll be fun.
Until next time, thanks for watching.
Don't forget to subscribe.
And stay mobile, my friends.
(techno music)