Motorola
StarTAC
The StarTAC’s folding two-part body and wearable carrying idea made it a recognizable 1990s handset. This archive uses the early 1996 AMPS 8500 as its baseline, with a separately captioned GSM photograph for comparison.
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- Platform
- Clamshell cellular phone family
- Operating system
- Motorola proprietary firmware; regional variants differ
Overview
The StarTAC’s folding two-part body and wearable carrying idea made it a recognizable 1990s handset. This archive uses the early 1996 AMPS 8500 as its baseline, with a separately captioned GSM photograph for comparison.
Period and variants
Motorola’s 1995 annual report explicitly dates the StarTAC introduction to January 1996. The filename is not its launch year. The original 3.1 oz figure is about 88 g; weights for later GSM or digital versions are not interchangeable.
StarTAC is a family across markets and radio standards. The original AMPS 8500 uses a red two-line LED display. The factory StarTAC 130 service manual instead describes GSM 900; it does not extend the analogue 8500’s bands or SIM capabilities. The photographed 1997 GSM unit is a comparison only.
Replaceable main and optional auxiliary batteries came in different chemistries and sizes. No universal capacity or endurance is inferred. Closed dimensions, display pixels, processor and storage for the earliest AMPS unit remain unspecified where original evidence is insufficient.
Sources
- Motorola — original 1995 annual report archive, January 1996 StarTAC introduction on PDF page 7
- MobileCollectors — physical StarTAC 8500 AMPS collection, original launch configuration and photographs
- Motorola — original StarTAC 130 GSM service manual; mirrored text
- Retromobe — author-owned GSM StarTAC 130 retrospective, 2008; original indexed text
Image credit
Nkp911m500 — First Generation Motorola StarTAC cellular phone.jpg · CC BY-SA 3.0. Commons thumbnail resize; no further edits. Shared under the same licence.
80sCompaqPC — StarTAC-8500.jpg · CC BY-SA 4.0. Commons thumbnail resize; no further edits. Shared under the same licence.
ProhibitOnions — MotorolaStarTAC.jpg · CC BY-SA 3.0. Commons thumbnail resize; no further edits. Shared under the same licence.
Optimized display images on this page have been proportionally resized (maximum dimension 1600 px) and compressed to WebP, without cropping or retouching. Statements above about unchanged files refer to the preserved collected originals; attribution, sources and original licenses still apply. Originals: 1, 2, 3.
Images collected from the Internet.
