Motorola's Good Call

Motorolas Good Call
The hot-selling Razr phone launched a comeback for Moto. Up next: more cool designs and iTunes phones.

Robert Brunner never expected to carry a Motorola phone. A partner at San Franciso's Pentagram Design, Brunner is a fan of fashionable products like Philippe Starck watches and Sony digital cameras.

The 76-year-old Motorola, on the other hand, has traditionally been "good at engineering things, not necessarily good at doing cool, well-detailed objects," Brunner says. Nevertheless, last fall he found himself joining countless other gadget hounds in a rush to the nearest Cingular store to buy the $349 Razr V3: an improbably thin mobile phone made of anodized aluminum, with an etched keypad and an antenna concealed in the mouthpiece.

Today, whenever Brunner takes out his Razr and lays it on a conference-room table, "the geeks crowd around," he says. "Everybody wants to play with it."

The edge from Moto's Razr has helped drive a remarkable turnaround at one of the oldest tech companies in America. Last week, analyst firm Gartner reported that brisk Razr sales have vaulted Motorola past Samsung and into the No. 2 spot in the mobile-phone market, behind sagging leader Nokia.

Motorola hopes to build on this momentum by leaning more heavily on innovative design, and plans to launch a new suite of distinctive phones late