Moto's Mojo

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Jim Wicks: Motorola VP, design guru, father of the new Pebl.

Wicks at Motorola's new satellite studio in downtown Chicago.

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Before Paris Hilton was photographed gabbing on her new Pebl at Sundance this year, before a batch of Pebls was in the works for Oscar nominees, before the TV ad debuted during the Super Bowl, before hundreds of thousands of the phones were in production--before any of that, Yoon Ho Choi, a designer in Seoul, South Korea, needed some inspiration.

It was 2003. Motorola had challenged designers to imagine the next mobile phone, something truly different. To brainstorm, Yoon Ho visited Apkujong-dong, the flashy high-fashion district in a city obsessed with glamour and technology. The way to set a new phone apart, he realized, wasn't by outglitzing the competition. Just the opposite: He sketched a small oval on a napkin, a phone that didn't look like a phone. It was the simplest, most organic Zen-like shape he could imagine, an intoxicatingly smooth river rock you could rub between your fingers.

When Jim Wicks, Motorola's vice president and director of consumer-experience design, reviewed the candidates with his managers, they agreed with Yoon Ho. Just how that sketch became a cell phone reveals much about the cultural and strategic evolution now taking place at Motorola. The 78-year-old company, based in Schaumburg, Illinois, outside Chicago, is one of America's oldest and most patent-rich tech giants and has long been an engineering innovator. Now it's trying to become a design innovator as well--and one with an audacious goal: "We want to create one iconic design a year," says Wicks.

If there was any doubt about what design could do for a company, even one as storied and vast as Motorola, its supersleek Razr erased them. In late 2004, the Razr entered a market crowded with hundreds of generic competitors and instantly stood out: a half-inch clamshell, or flip phone, with a flat, square metal body, etched keypad, and internal antenna. The Razr has sold more than 24 million units. It has done for clamshells what the iPod did for MP3 players, says David Steinberg, CEO of online phone retailer InPhonic. And it helped boost Motorola's revenues ($31 billion in 2004, more than half from mobile devices) and profits, solidifying its position as No. 1 in North America, No. 2 worldwide. "Motorola has had this reputation as being stodgy and conservative," says Kent German, CNet's senior editor of cell phones, "and all of a sudden, it's cool."

Over the past year, taking a cue from Apple and its iPod family, Motorola has been busily spinning off Razr derivatives--black and hot-pink Razrs, as well as the Slvr (a candy bar, or no-flip, phone) and the Q, a BlackBerry challenger. Though sharp, they're variations on the same theme, and there's no guarantee they'll wow the public: The iTunes-equipped Rokr, for example, was roundly panned in 2005, the first case of Razr burn since the original's debut. Even the overall design itself can become a liability if it becomes too ubiquitous. "Motorola has to do more than thin phones," says German. The handset-to-handset combat intensified late last year with the first wave of Razr imitators.

Lest we forget, Motorola--which introduced the world's first cell phone in 1983--has struggled in this market before. It scored big in 1996 with the StarTac, which sold an estimated 75 million units, but by 1998 Nokia was No. 1. Meanwhile, semiconductor troubles were hurting Motorola, which lost $6.4 billion in 2001 and 2002, closed multiple factories, and laid off 50,000 employees. The handset business had problems of its own, missing the switch to digital and the camera-phone trend. Analysts speculated whether it should sell its handset division altogether.

It dodged that bullet in late 2003 by bringing in Ed Zander, a Silicon Valley star, to be CEO, replacing Chris Galvin, the grandson of founder Paul Galvin. Under Zander, the company began reassessing its priorities. Product design was transformed from an afterthought into a mission. The company even went so far as to retool its own name for marketing purposes, junking the anachronistic marriage of "motor car" and "Victrola" (a reflection of its roots as a builder of car radios) in favor of the trendy "Moto." A year later, along came the Razr--and a big sigh of relief.

But now the company is at the inevitable crossroads again, forced to come up with another winning design in a bloodthirsty and innovative market (120 out of 135 handset makers lose money, according to one analyst). The time has come, in other words, for Wicks's next icon. And while there's no question that the Pebl is something novel, something aesthetically nuanced and pleasing, questions are hanging over it: Is it any good? Will consumers clamor for it the way they did for the Razr? Has Motorola's new emphasis on design come at the expense of engineering and/or execution? And is this $300 phone going to make a splash, or just quietly sink?