Motorola SLVR & KRZR
The Razr's thinner siblings. The SLVR was the Razr flattened into a candybar with iTunes inside; the KRZR was the Razr stretched taller and narrower under a glossy glass face. Neither escaped the original's shadow.
The Razr V3 arrived in 2004 and became wildly popular, and Motorola spent the next three years cutting it into other shapes. The first was the SLVR L7, announced at the 3GSM fair on February 14, 2005, under the name SLVR V8: the Razr's flat keypad on a candybar body 11.5 mm thick, which counted as very thin at the time. Its trick, on U.S. units only, was iTunes — one of the few non-Apple phones ever to run Apple's player, holding up to 100 downloaded songs on a removable microSD card. It superseded the earlier iTunes phone, the Rokr E1, introduced at the same September 2005 event as the iPod nano and withdrawn after lackluster sales. Cingular carried the SLVR in the United States alongside MetroPCS and Cricket; Sprint sold a red CDMA L7c and Verizon a silver one.
The KRZR K1 — pronounced "crazer" — was announced on July 1, 2006, as a flip phone: longer and narrower than the Razr, with a glossy glass finish, a smaller screen, a 2-megapixel camera and a microSD slot, in colors Motorola named cosmic blue, fire red, summit gold and silver quartz. It had been codenamed "Canary" and was at one stage going to be called the Razr K1. The CDMA K1m for Verizon, Sprint, Alltel and Boost put touch music controls on the outside of the flip, and the 3G-capable K3 followed in February 2007.
Motorola kept the family going: the blue SLVR L7e of October 2006, the L9 with an FM radio in February 2007, cheaper L6 and L2 models that dropped the SLVR name, and a Product Red SLVR sold by British networks to support the Global Fund's HIV/AIDS programs. Owners mostly remember the low-battery beep, a loud chirp the SLVR repeated until you silenced it or plugged it in. The phone also had a strange afterlife: the NSA's leaked ANT catalog lists a $15,000 covert-surveillance handset, fitted with a software-defined radio, that is widely identified as a modified SLVR.
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