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. Everything about the SLVR's design is well done. The anodized-aluminum back, glass-infused plastic case, metal keypad, glass screen, and well-balanced heft of this half-inch-thick status symbol make it feel far more expensive than the $199 Cingular charges (and more expensive than its little brother the SLVR L6). The L7 is hard to keep in your pocket—you want to take it out, touch it, and show it off. Along with its RAZR cousins, the quad-band SLVR L7 gets excellent reception, though sound quality isn't quite as good. We found that voices, both sent and received, are sharp, and the earpiece volume is loud enough, if not very loud. But the speakerphone is quiet and picks up a lot of background noise. MP3 ringtones are loud (and you can upload your own with Bluetooth). The vibrating alert felt a bit weak, though. We hooked the phone up to Logitech, Jabra, and Plantronics Bluetooth headsets without problems. The metal keypad, with raised rubber numbers, has buttons that are bigger than those on the SLVR L6, but still smaller than the RAZR's. They're of acceptable size, though, and the rubber nubs tell you where the numbers are located. Physical buttons on the side of the phone activate the camera and the voice dialing. You get to iTunes by pressing a front-panel key from the home screen. Because of technical problems, we couldn't finish our battery tests by our deadline. We'll update the review soon with battery results.

If we were to guess, though, we'd bet this would have similar talk time to the SLVR L6, on the low end of average.The Second iTunes PhoneThe SLVR L7 is the second iTunes phone, but the ROKR E1 is actually a better music player. Both store up to 100 songs per microSD card in iTunes. The SLVR L7 comes with a 512MB card. Plug the phone into an iTunes-equipped computer, and it will appear as an iPod Shuffle to Apple's music software. Like the ROKR, but unlike all iPods, the SLVR connects to just one computer—plug into another, and all your music goes up in smoke. Also, files transfer over USB 1.1, which is painfully slow: A 25.5MB podcast transfer took 1 minute 45 seconds. Once on the phone, your music plays through the built-in speaker or a wired headset using the very easy, built-in iTunes application. The SLVR also follows the ROKR's lead by including Motorola's second, unrestricted MP3/AAC player, which accepts files via Bluetooth, lets you set your songs as ringtones, and doesn't have the 100-song-per-card limit. But that player is more difficult to use and doesn't sync with PCs the way iTunes does. Audio performance is adequate, as long as you're not into bass. On our frequency response test, it dropped off very quickly below 100 Hz, resulting in pretty weak lows. Overall, sound with the included earbuds was very muffled, yet it was a bit harsh through our high-end reference headphones because of a slight lift in frequency response in the treble register. The ROKR sounded better.

Motorola also made a fatal error by using the mini USB jack as a headphone connector. Listening to quieter passages with the included earbuds, we noticed some digital noise in the background. It disappeared when we used our high-end Etymotic ER4P headphones with the supplied USB adapter. The adapter doesn't have a microphone (unlike the adapters for the ROKR E1 or Sony Ericsson W800i), though, so if you use "real" earphones, you have to unplug them every time the phone rings—totally unacceptable. Attaching a Bluetooth headset also disables the music player—you can't listen to music over the headset, and you have to turn off the headset to use the phone's speaker for music. And although the single mono speaker on the phone itself is loud, it's still mono. Other than iTunes, the SLVR's feature set is pretty 2004. There's a basic POP3 e-mail client, an instant-messaging client that handles AIM and Yahoo!, a dim, blurry camera that takes VGA stills and 5 frame-per-second, 176-by-144 video, and a glacially slow GPRS data capability.

You can use the phone as a PC modem, though we can't understand why anyone would want to crawl along at 30-40 Kbps. 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 (http://www.dynamism.com/). We'd recommend it to non–power users looking for a pretty, pretty phone.

Source:pcmag