20 years of restarting life

In January 99, Motorol launched the world's first flip phone, the 1C.

The mobile phone is divided into two parts. At the bottom of the small screen keyboard of the handset of the main mobile phone, a rotating shaft is designed, which is connected to another shell protection part of the mobile phone.

In addition to protecting the screen and buttons, this protective case will not be accidentally touched by scratches or water. At the same time, a small microphone is built in to make a sound when making a call.

The fuselage has red, blue, purple, yellow, gray, five optional colors.

With an external antenna, the mobile phone weighs 95 grams. It has simple functions such as input method, SMS function, phone address book, call record, and 9 optional ringtones.

This one is actually at the bottom of the bar machine, a rotating shaft is added, and a thin plastic shell is connected.

Two thin weak wires were pulled inside the empty shell, and a mini button microphone was placed.

This almost perfectly solves the distance between the mouth and the ears required for mobile phone calls, and also allows the mobile phone to be folded up to become small and exquisite when not in use, also known as "palm treasure".

And the added protection of this plastic case only increases the cost of the entire mobile phone by more than ten yuan.

Of course, this comparison cannot be calculated so simply. The Motorol308C project team spent more than half a year on the project approval, design, and prototype of the 308C mobile phone.

Then it took nearly a year to set up the supply chain, assemble and debug the production line, trial production, and finally finalize the production.

That is to say, Motorol has invested at least tens of millions of euros for the cost of the increase of more than ten dollars.

In fact, this design is still a retro feeling of Motorol.

That is, the designers of the 308C considered that the screen of the mobile phone is not wear-resistant, so it is better to add a cover to it as a protective case like the original "Big Brother".

Just like the previous CD928, GC87C also adopts this protective case design.

However, the rotating shaft protection cover at the bottom of the mobile phone of these two products has completely copied the design of the 'big phone', only protecting the buttons, exposing the screen and earpiece of the mobile phone.

However, the designers of the 308C have two unconventional points. The first improvement is to extend the length of the protective case, so that the overall shape and the main body of the mobile phone are completely overlapped, so that after closing, the mobile phone can be completely covered, which has become a standard meaning. foldable phone.

The second magic touch is to add a microphone function to the protective case by the way.

However, Motorol's small change, or more accurately, it should be "retro", has unintentionally triggered a great shock in the global mobile phone industry.

The designers of the appearance of mobile phones, as well as the users who bought mobile phones, realized for the first time that not only old and outdated "big brothers" can do this, but modern new compact mobile phones can also be made This way.

The "retro" 308C flip phone, which gained fame for a while, has also become a sky-high price mobile phone, with a retail price of more than [-] yuan.

And what surprised Motorol even more is that this design is much more popular in East and Southeast Asian countries than in European, American and Western countries where the response is mediocre.

In the past, products could be sold short in an instant, and the market was always in a state of hunger and thirst.

Therefore, while Motorol increased the production capacity of 308C to fully supply the East Asian and Southeast Asian markets, according to the market feedback, the designers and technicians adjusted the original rotation axis at the bottom of the mobile phone to the top.

Flip down from the clamshell to flip up the clamshell, making a 308C enhanced '+'.

Although it was only a small change of 'up' and 'down', it brought a derivative surprise, that is, in the old version of 308C, because the earpiece needs to be made as large as possible, on the small main plane Inlaid with three modules of 'button', 'screen' and 'handset'.

It makes the screen size can't be bigger.

We can only make a compromise by placing a 4×1cm small black and white monochrome screen with an area of ​​only 4cm between the 'button' and the 'earpiece'.

With such a small screen, it must be inconvenient to distinguish the caller ID inside and send and receive text messages.

Now, if you choose the improved flip-up model, you can turn the earpiece to the top of the flip cover, and the button-shaped mini microphone is placed at the bottom of the main body of the phone, just make a few small pinholes.

In this way, the lower body of 308C+ only has two surface modules.

'Keys' and 'Screen'.

The screen of the mobile phone has also been made into a size of 4.3×2.3cm, and the screen area has reached 9.89cm, which is more than twice the size of the original small long strip screen.

This improvement not only made the 308C+ sell like crazy in East Asia and Southeast Asia, but even in Europe and the United States, which pay more attention to the practical value of the product, some young people who pride themselves on fashion and personality began to accept this model.

At the beginning of this year, the designers of Motorol308C+ took advantage of the victory and launched the second clamshell mobile phone, V998.

Once again, it caused surprise and uproar in the industry.

Because before this, the world's major mobile phone manufacturers, except for Motorol's 308C+, did not have any mobile phone manufacturers to follow up and imitate flip phones.

Because this kind of thing is not a simple thing that can be easily done with one sentence.

From product project approval, designers and engineering departments collaborate to make prototypes, test, edit new product parameters and data standards, seek new component suppliers, and design and build new mobile phone production lines.

This is almost tantamount to starting all over again, which takes a lot of time, money and manpower.

The previous bar machine is already a mature line covering the entire industry chain.

Moreover, bar machines occupy an absolute mainstream market share in the entire Western developed countries. According to the deep-rooted contempt of these arrogant Westerners, the entire Asia, Africa and Latin America should undertake their backward and eliminated production capacity and products. How could it be possible to cater to these economies? The preferences of users in underdeveloped areas, and more time-consuming and laborious research and development of new products?

This time Motorol's V998 has a greater improvement in design than the 308C+. It has changed from the previous two primary and secondary parts of the main body and the shell to a double main body structure.

The bottom part used to be the main body of the buttons and the screen, but it has become a full keyboard coverage, while the top part originally only had a receiver function, but the screen has also been moved over, and the screen and the receiver have coexisted.

At that time, the mobile phone had nineteen mechanical buttons. The original 308C and 308C+ both sacrificed the area of ​​the buttons to make room.

Now, all the surface space of the lower body is reserved for these nineteen buttons, and the upper flip cover that was originally a lot of space and wasted was fully utilized, half of the screen and half of the earpiece.

In this way, the three most important external modules of human-computer communication, 'buttons', 'screen' and 'earpiece', completely fill the space of the upper and lower clamshells of the mobile phone, which also makes the modules of clamshell phones inferior compared to bar phones. Not only has it been replenished, but the entire outreach area is larger than that of the bar machine.

As a result, V998 in the Western European and American markets is no longer just like the original 308C and 308C+, it is only a market for a small number of non-mainstream young people who show their individuality and mavericks, but it has become popular among users of all walks of life in the entire large market.

So far, as long as observers with a little ability to identify the wind vane of the mobile phone industry can almost see it at this time, at least before the arrival of new major changes in mobile phones, it is very likely that one of the standard configurations of high-end mobile phones in the future will be ' Flip! '