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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The initial problem was just opening and closing the thing. The line between the top and bottom halves was almost invisible, making it hard to pry them apart. But Wicks and company wanted to keep the seamless feel--and they wanted to make the Pebl the first easy-to-use, one-handed clamshell. So mechanical engineer Brian Hassemer tried solving the problem by combining elements from a flip and another phone type, a slider. He designed the Pebl's top to slide along two internal rails; the springs in the hinge then popped it open.

So far, so good. But how to counteract the springs and keep the phone closed? He ruled out the obvious solution, a latch, because it would ruin the smooth seam. Also, closing the phone would require two steps, which violated a key design value, simplicity. Eventually, Hassemer found the answer in his own kitchen cabinets: magnets. But even that breakthrough required refinement. In addition to the pair of attracting magnets that keeps the handset closed, he added another, opposing set; when the top slides down, they repel each other, pushing the halves apart. The springs do the rest. That mechanism is what "connects with people," says Pierce. "It's one of the things that makes a lasting impression, because you weren't expecting it."

Another challenge was fitting square and rectangular components--screens, battery, keypad--into a rounded container. Curves look great, but they're inefficient; because you can't wedge a component flush into a corner, you have wasted space, an engineering anathema. And unlike the Razr, which had an objective goal (0.54 inches thin), round is relative, another thing that sends engineers around the bend. The phone required certain features--color screen, camera, speakerphone, Bluetooth--that created agonizing trade-offs. The Pebl needed a screen big enough to display photos and video, but that used more juice. So you can't skimp on battery life, but if the battery gets too big, the oblong shape of the phone becomes wider or less curvy.

Difficult? Sure, but also exhilarating.

"The most interesting projects have the most constraints," says Giles McWilliam, the Pebl's lead industrial designer. After tweaking, he'd share the latest of dozens of prototypes with colleagues. "Sometimes it was clear, we're not a Pebl there, we're a rounded box," he says. "Other times, the change was 0.1 or 0.2 millimeters." In the end, there wasn't room for a megapixel camera, just a lower-resolution one. Design, not function, had become the higher priority; the Pebl's unique look and feel, Wicks and his team decided, trumped the latest camera.

That decision was based, in part, on consumer research, including hour-and-a-half, one-on-one consumer interviews. "We're digging deep," says Wicks. "It's not about asking, 'Which configuration do you want--this one or that one?' It's about finding out what different configurations represent to people."

But the research can tell designers only so much. Ultimately, he says, design requires a leap of faith. The data can define the parameters, but too much consumer feedback during development becomes counterproductive. "You have to have the guts to believe in what you're doing and what your brand stands for," says Wicks. "If you go back to the first Walkman, nobody was telling Sony, 'I want a Walkman.' "

Sink or Swim

Eventually, Wicks and his team had to stop psychoanalyzing the public and just start building. Wicks refers to his "business-driven design strategy": Design, after all, is no less important than marketing, sales, engineering, and the rest. Conversely, a beautiful product won't sell if its software or marketing is flawed. So how'd Moto do?

The early reviews are mixed--and suggest that the pendulum swing toward design might have left other aspects of the process to fend for themselves: On CNet, Pebl owners rave about its stylish appearance and feel but gripe about short battery life and sluggish software (an echo of the complaints about Motorola's V70, a striking but disappointing phone). According to Bryce Rutter, the founder and CEO of Metaphase Design Group in St. Louis, which specializes in handheld devices, one of the keys to the Razr's success was that it doesn't resemble "a tumor bulging in your pocket." The Pebl, though, is tumoresque and unlikely to make much of a pocket phone, which could narrow its audience considerably. Meanwhile, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, it wasn't unusual to see people go from gasping to grumbling as they struggled to find the secret to opening the Pebl. And when it does open, the top flips so quickly that novices can struggle just to hold onto it--meaning that some phones hit the floor before they were even up and running. Rutter agrees that its "defining gesture" isn't intuitive, a flaw even if the learning curve is short. "But we're nitpicking," he says. He thinks the Pebl could ultimately have broad appeal by humanizing the cell phone--a design first. The Pebl is "for the person who lives with technology but wants to tame it," says Rutter.