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Think back, if you will, to October 2004. It was an innocent time, a time when to have a cell phone typically meant one of those Nokia bullets or a Motorola V60 (hey, remember those?), or if you were all fancy, a big-ass Blackberry. We bring this up for one important reason: to trace just how you, and we, got suckered—yes, suckered—into buying possibly the worst phone on the market today, the Motorola RAZR.

Put quite frankly, the RAZR sucks. The battery life is nonexistent. It gets horrible reception. There's a delay between when you press the keys and the phone actually responds. We could go on, but we're more interested into why so many of us were suckered into buying this phone in the first place. We're not total tech geeks, but we are, generally, savvy consumers. But we, and all our friends, fell for the RAZR hook, line, and sinker—and now thanks to shitty contracts and various other ways that the cell phone companies manage to anally rape us every time we walk in the store, we're stuck with this for at least another year.

Our brothers at Gizmodo recently posted a long—very long—exposition on how the RAZR went from being a $500 phone to a phone that's basically being given away. Also an interesting question, but we're more interested in why we were suckered into buying the phone in the first place.

Some have pointed to the RAZR's thinness as the reason behind its success—13.9mm! That's, like, cell phone anorexia—and, certainly, that's part of its appeal. But we think it's more likely that you, and we, were victims of a carefully orchestrated, seductive marketing campaign. Take this press release from 2005: "Instrumental in transitioning Motorola's image from an engineering-focused company to a hip, trend-setting marketing company, the RAZR helped Motorola post an industry-leading performance- clocking in handset sales growth of 49% in the fourth quarter of 2004 and to-date selling over five million units globally." We should've listened to things like the Idiot Toys site, which wrote about the Motorola RAZR Z: "It looks all right but we can't get excited about something that's always marketed as BEING REALLY COOL AND EDGY and for celebrities." So, so true. And yet ... and yet! Are we really such sheep that we will buy something that is just supposed to be cool? New Yorkers are supposed to be trendsetters, ahead of the curve. But we're rushing to buy these—which are now just about being given away—as quickly as anyone in Middle America. How could we have gone so wrong? More theories, commiserations, etc.—you know where to send 'em.

Thin Is In: Motorola Continues Winning Streak [Motorola]
Low End Theory: The Great RAZR Swindle [Gizmodo]
Motorola RAZR Z, Being Held [Idiot Toys]