Review of Motorola SLVR L7
Review of Motorola SLVR L7
The Motorola SLVR L7 may be the handsomest phone in America. But even though it runs Apple’s popular iTunes music player, its feature set doesn’t excite us. (One example: Like the RAZR V3, but unlike the newer V3c, the SLVR L7 uses the primitive recorded-tag form of voice dialing.) Like the Motorola RAZR V3, this is a phone that will best satisfy voice callers who want a see-and-be-seen device.
Hitting store shelves this season, the SLVR L7 is the next ultra-thin product to be released from Motorola’s fashion-forward portfolio.
Featuring a block form factor that’s even slimmer than the RAZR, the 11.5 mm-thin SLVR weighs just 86 grams. Integrated with Apple’s popular iTunes software, consumers will be able to load up to 100 songs for hours of musical enjoyment. Supplied with a 176 x 220 px TFT screen displaying up to 262K colors, a built-in VGA camera with 4x zoom and video capture and playback ensure shutterbugs never miss a beat.
Cingular began selling Motorola’s SLVR L7 just three days ago, but critics have wasted little time checking it out, and the net is already being flooding with reviews. Not surprisingly, a lot of the reviews reach similar conclusions: stylish phone, so-so music player. After all, the SLVR L7’s iTunes implementation is basically the same as the one on the much-beloved ROKR E1, meaning it’s limited to just 100 songs. That hasn’t stopped Cingular from promoting iTunes as the main feature behind the SLVR; promotional materials and the phone’s retail box proclaim “iTunes Cingular” in big letters, with the phone’s model name in almost invisble text.
The Motorola SLVR brings a 262k color TFT display, quad-band compatibility, and Push-to-Talk to the table, as well as microSD expansion and the controversial Motorola-customized iTunes music player. It is just as well that it comes with a memory expansion slot, as the handset includes only 5MB of on board memory (and before anyone asks, the SLVR keeps the 100-song limit for music played through iTunes). Other than this, the Motorola SLVR is pretty standard slim-phone fair, weighing only 86g, being 11mm (0.45″) thick, and including only a VGA camera.
The Motorola SLVR is available now from Cingular for US$199.99 with a two-year service agreement.
The new phone which is ultra thin, takes on the styling of the popular RAZR model in the candy bar form factor. It comes with a 64MB Micro SD card in the box for storing music and other data on and Bluetooth compatibility as standard. Pocket-lint will be posting a review in the next couple of days of the phone once we’ve had a better chance to play with it and put it through its paces.
Rounding out the features with Bluetooth Class 2 wireless connectivity, J2ME downloadable games, and AOL, ICQ, and Yahoo! instant messaging chat, Motorola managed to pack a long list of multimedia features into a uniquely thin device. Released on Cingular’s network, Motorola still hopes the SLVR will achieve the same golden touch it did with the RAZR a year ago.
Bluetooth support is pretty good, but it’s the slower Bluetooth 1.2, not the newer, faster Bluetooth 2.0+EDR. You can sync your contacts and calendar over Bluetooth with Apple’s iSync or Motorola’s Mobile Phone Tools for the PC, and you can transfer photos to and from your PC with Bluetooth. You can’t beam music into the phone’s iTunes player, though.
The SLVR L7 is available for $199.99 with a two-year contract from Cingular. An unlocked model, suitable for T-Mobile but lacking iTunes, is $359.00 from Dynamism (www.dynamism.com). We’d recommend it to non–power users looking for a pretty, pretty phone.