Motorola
PEBL U6

The PEBL was named after it’s codename ‘Pebble’. This was in contravention of Motorola’s codename policy which was to use the names of islands for GSM products and cities for CDMA devices in an effort that was designed to keep products secret.* It was widely considered internally that Pebble, for a phone which looked like a pebble, was a terrible codename. As a result, a compliant codename was forced on the project for a while with the team being told to call it Virgin, after the Virgin Islands. The manager of the team eventually pushed back on this saying that it made her engineers giggle. Ironically, eventually someone looked at a map and found an Island called Pebble, probably the one in the Falkland’s Islands, and the issue was laid to rest. The phone had a novel magnet, hinge and spring mechanism which meant you could hold it, slide your thumb to pull down the front and when you let go the lid flipped up. Unfortunately given the weight of the screen this frequently caused it to overbalance and tumble out of a user’s hand. However, if you got your grip correct, at just the right time, it delivered a very cool experience. Part of the inspiration for the large number of colour variants eventually offered, and known as the ‘fruity Pebbles’, was the Apple iPod which was being sold in a many different colours. This approach also meant that retailers would display the phone several times helping Motorola win in a battle for shelf space. * This naming approach fell down with the dual mode A860 phone that was both GSM and CDMA and was codenamed Hong Kong.