The forgotten phone: Motorola Motofone F3

January 8, 2023 Luisa Rey

Design and compactness, that was central to the Motorola Motofone F3. Today we discuss the stylish telephone in our new edition of the section ‘The forgotten telephone’. What can be said about the device?

Motorola Motofone F3

When you see the Motorola Motofone F3, a light will probably light up that looks familiar to you. The device had some different names, but the best known is the name Motofone, which gave the device the type number F3.

The black-colored device from Motorola appeared on the market in the year 2006. This device was not just a mobile phone. The device was ideal for people who had visual problems. Partly for this reason, the Motofone F3 was characterized by simple symbols and the possibility to switch on speech synthesis, with which texts can be read. Nice thing about the device was that we actually saw a bit of the notch here, which we now know from smartphones. The notch contained the Motorola logo. On the left, the strength of the reception was shown with blocks, on the right the capacity of the battery.

There was something special about the F3. The Motorola had a special screen, consisting of so-called electronic paper that was described with the name ‘ClearVision’. E Ink was used. This made the device nice and thin at only 9 millimeters, it was very economical with the battery and the screen was easy to read outdoors. There wasn’t much room for text, only six characters per row were shown, and there were only two rows. Also, the Motofone F3 could not handle all types of characters. For example, a hashtag (#) resembled the H and the S and the 5 were also indistinguishable.

The Motorola Motofone F3 weighed only 70 grams and had a screen size of 2.2 inches. Many other properties had ‘no’ listed in the specifications. Motorola released the device for an amount of around fifty euros. The F3 from Motorola was also released in the Netherlands. Nice detail; the phone did not appear in a standard box, but was sold in a tin. You can get an impression of this in the video below.