Motorola
Ruby VE1

While most of the Motorola development of Symbian UIQ smartphones was done in Europe, a couple of projects were worked on at its headquarters in Chicago. Ruby VE1 (which is sometimes inaccurately described as Razr3) was one of these projects and, as such, was not classified as a MotoNoir product. MotoNoir was a quasi-skunkworks smartphone division with development teams spread across the UK, Denmark, France, and Italy which worked on products such as the RIZR V10. The RAZR-like industrial design was potentially adapted from a global product that was originally destined to be on the Linux Java platform. This alternative smartphone OS strategy was being worked on at Motorola before it ultimately decided to go with Google’s Android operating system. Uniquely the Ruby VE1 was a clamshell with dual 262K colour displays (in contrast all MotoNoir devices were no compromise media phones so were supposed to be equipped with 16 million colour displays). It featured a mixture of design elements including chrome accents and a brushed metal battery door. Its unique hinge allowed owners to take advantage of the five-megapixel camera while the phone was shut using the external display as the viewfinder. But when opened, it would become a forward-facing camera to allow for video calls and selfies. Ruby VE1 made it to almost final hardware, but the software, which featured complex dual-display interactions, was nowhere near finished when the Symbian UIQ programme was abandoned as the software entity entered bankruptcy. As a result, the phone was cancelled and is therefore a rare prototype in the Mobile Phone Museum collection.