Motorola V phone
keyboard telephone made by Motorola in 1999
The Motorola V series is a lineup of compact clamshell mobile phones designed by Motorola as a successor of the StarTAC line. It was originally released in October 1998 as v3620 on the analog AMPS network in North America, followed by a digital GSM release in other territories as v3688 or v998 (China) in early 1999. Based on a clamshell design like the StarTAC series, its body is 25% narrower by comparison and at 2.7 ounces was the lightest and smallest cell phone at the time. Because of its physical characteristics, it became highly popular for being fashionable.
In 2000, a GSM variant for the North American market was released as the v3682, while a cdmaOne variant was released there as v8160/v8162 ("Vulcan"). The original V phone was succeeded by two updated versions: first the v3690 then the v50, before they were majorly succeeded by Motorola V66 and the flagship Motorola V60 in 2001.
Name
Officially the V Series (later stylized to V. series), both the analog V3620 and digital V3688 were also called by the media and individuals as simply the "V phone", and had initially also been affectionally referred to by some as the "Mini StarTAC" or "Baby StarTAC". It was also referred to as the "Vader", which was the development code name for the V3620 model. This nickname has also been used collectively for the V3688 and all other similar models afterwards, as they all look almost the same from a distance. In Italian the V phone was also nicknamed "dattero", the word for dates.
“Motorola V phone” enters the record as keyboard telephone made by Motorola in 1999. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Motorola, phone and keyboard can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6918433. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Motorola V phone” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.