Motorola
ROKR Texel

Texel was an unreleased music-centric smartphone from the multimedia division of Motorola codenamed MotoNoir, a quasi-skunk works smartphone division with development teams spread across the UK, Denmark, France, Italy and of course at HQ in Chicago. It made it to almost production hardware before the division was shuttered. After the success of the RAZR, Motorola was into using four-letter abbreviated descriptors of its products. Texel was both a SCPL (scalpel) class device; a slim candy bar format, and because music was central to its proposition, it would have been part of the ROKR product portfolio. It had a generous (for the time) 2.8-inch screen which had haptic feedback for partial touch at the bottom of the display to navigate through a ‘morphing widget’ UI, combined with physical soft keys and a dedicated ‘media’ button for one-touch access to your music. Despite listening to music being the key selling point, Texel still had a 3MP rear-facing camera and a forward-facing CIF camera for video calls. While it was still the early days of streaming media, Texel could connect to multimedia services via HSDPA or Wi-Fi. Alternatively, you could side-load music via USB 2.0 onto the 4GB of onboard memory and/or MicroSD. It also was planned to have an FM radio with RDS and a 3.5mm jack to allow you to use high-end headphones. The device in the Mobile Phone Museum collection is extremely rare version of the Texel due to its metallic red surround.