Thin-phone mania seems to be sweeping the hemisphere. At the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas last week, everybody seemed to have some sort of SLVR clone. Samsung's T509 SLVR clone won "best in show" for its category in CTIA's Emerging Technology Awards, and the actual Motorola SLVR L7 itself won first place just behind it.

Motorola's done a good job marketing the SLVR, a gorgeous, 0.45-inch-thick phone with iTunes. They've done such a good job, that you might think the SLVR is the first phone of its kind, or at least the thinnest yet. But back in 1999, I had a phone almost as thin. The Qualcomm Thin Phone was even more comfortable to hold than the SLVR. Yeah, it was a touch thicker at 0.6 inches, but this was 1999. By 2001, Sanyo introduced their SCP-6000 Thin Phone, which tapered from 0.6 to 0.39 inches at its thinnest point -- thinner than today's SLVR.

Meanwhile, every manufacturer I met at CTIA seemed to have a thin phone. The Samsung T509's gimmick is that it's even thinner than the SLVR (and it's coming out on T-Mobile, which doesn't have a SLVR of its own.) UTStarcom has two SLVR clones, the PCS1400 and PCS1450; one of them seems destined for Sprint. VK Mobile's 2030 is way thinner than the SLVR; if you hold it the wrong way you'll get a paper cut. The no-name Chinese cloners got into the act, too. But is the SLVR selling? It doesn't seem to be rocking the US the way the RAZR did - in part because it's a candy-bar phone when 70% of Americans prefer flips. But it's definitely causing ripples in the world of phone design the way the RAZR did.

Click on the image below to blow it up. From top left: Qualcomm's thin phone, Sanyo SCP-6000, SLVR L7, Samsung T509, UTStarcom PCS1400, VK Mobile 2030, and two random Chinese SLVR clones from ZTE and HiSense.