The year is 2004, and every other mobile phone on the planet has just been made to look like a piece of farm machinery. The Motorola Razr V3 has arrived, and it is quite possibly the most beautiful object ever fashioned from aircraft-grade aluminium. Measuring just 13.9mm thick when closed, it is so thin that Motorola had to invent a whole new way of making keypads. Instead of plastic buttons, you get a single sheet of nickel-plated copper with chemically etched numbers that glow with a stunning electroluminescent blue light. When you pull this out in a London bar and flick it open with a thumb, the conversation at the table simply stops. It isn’t just a phone; it’s a £500 fashion statement that happens to make calls.nnOn the technical side, the Razr V3 is a triumph of miniaturisation, though it does make some sacrifices for that svelte profile. The main internal screen is a gorgeous 2.2-inch TFT with 65k colours, and the external display is a smaller CSTN panel that handles caller ID. It’s a quad-band GSM phone, meaning it’s a true global roamer, and it features Bluetooth for hands-free calling in your BMW. However, the internal memory is a paltry 5.5MB, and there is no expansion slot. This means that while you have a VGA camera and video playback capabilities, you can only store about ten photos and a very short, grainier-than-sand clip of your dog. It’s a ’boutique’ phone, and Motorola clearly assumes that if you can afford this, you aren’t worried about things as pedestrian as ‘file storage’.nnThe user interface is the standard Motorola ‘MotoGUI,’ which, while improved over the older models, still feels like it was translated from an alien language. It’s a bit clunky and occasionally slow to respond, but you’re too busy admiring the finish of the metal to really care. The battery life is surprisingly decent for a phone this thin, offering about 250 hours of standby, though heavy use of the Bluetooth will see that drop significantly. The Razr V3 isn’t for the tech-spec warrior who wants 20MB of RAM; it’s for the person who wants to hold a piece of the future in their hand. It is the definitive design icon of the decade, a masterclass in aesthetics that has single-handedly made Motorola the coolest brand in the UK again.