Motorola RIZR Z12 rare prototype in the wild
( Thanks mobilephonemuseum for the info)
The RIZR Z12 was an unreleased 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.
Codenamed Skarven (almost all MotoNoir devices were named after mostly Nordic islands) the Z12 was going to be the first in a series of flagship ‘kick slide’ equipped smartphones using a hybrid touch UI (user interface) version of the Symbian UIQ operating system. When closed, you could use on-screen soft keys with ‘morphing widgets’ that could be swiped and scrolled through with one hand. In landscape mode, the widgets would expand to provide a full touch screen interface for two-handed use.
Ahead of its time in many ways, the 16 million-colour, 2.8-inch touchscreen was HD ready at 720p to playback movies on the go, something the RIZR Z8 and RIZR Z10 had established by having the Jason Bourne movies supplied on MicroSD as part of a promotion. However, Skarven could hold up to 12 films in its 4GB of onboard flash memory and support for 12GB of MicroSD storage. It had a five-megapixel autofocus camera and GPS to provide turn-by-turn navigation with maps provided by Navteq. Unlike many smartphones of the time, it offered full web browsing capabilities over 3G and Wi-Fi.
The Z12 prototype was reveled by Reddit user techformative557 who reveled even more prototypes in his video on youtube (Full video in this link )
As you may remember, Last year we reveled exclusively here the Motorola Z10 prototype (Codename Helsinki) and an additional rare Z8 Prototypes. The Z12 showing in this article was the successor of this RIZR slider devices that was unfortunately never released.
It is really refreshing to see it live in a video after all this years.
