The Inside Scoop From an I.T. Ninja

Did you just say I.T. Ninja??

Yes I said I.T. ninja, that's me. I work in I.T. and when it comes to gizmos and gadgets, I'm "the guy". I'm the guy that everybody asks when they need advice on buying a new phone, a printer, a digital camera. I'm the guy that can program every car radio I've every come across. My family's VCR has never blinked 12:00. I'm not bragging, I'm just preparing you. Towards the middle of this review, when I tell you that this phone is difficult to use, I don't want you to think that I'm some luddite that's afraid of technology. No, I embrace technology with a passion, which is why I'm so saddened to have to write this review. I desperately wanted to love this phone. Amazing features, combined with a sleek look in a slim sexy mobile kind of way... this appeared to be the perfect phone. Alas, it was not so. This phone has enough little problems that render the whole phone as sub-par. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This phone does have a ton of amazing features, which I'll share with you now.

Why This Phone is so Fabulous - The Look & Feel

The SLVR is a sharp looking phone. Made of black plastic with silver metal accents, the designers clearly spent a fair amount of time on the look of the phone. Turn it on and the backlit keypad and high-resolution display take this phone from nice looking to holy-crap-that's-pretty. Not only does this phone look great, it's slim and light enough that you could put it in a shirt pocket and forget it's there. It's also not so miniscule that you can't press the buttons or see the screen. I'd say it's just the right size for the average user. I don't want to spend too much time on look and feel. If you're seriously considering buying this phone, I'm sure you'll play with it in the store before you take it home. As far as buttons, There's a 4 way navigation pad in the middle, along with the standard number-pad, call and hang-up buttons, and menu selection buttons right under the screen. There are also 3 buttons on the left side of the phone: volume up, volume down, and a shortcut to My Stuff including camera, sounds, pictures, etc. There's one button on the right side of the phone that activates the voice-dialing feature.

Why This Phone is so Fabulous - Phone Quality

I wish more money and energy were invested into just making cell phones work. My highest priority for buying a new phone is that it must work as a phone! Forget about dazzling features, I want to be able to make and receive phone calls. This phone does very well in that department. The internal antenna is strong enough that even with only one or two bars, I can still hear and be heard clearly. The sound quality is higher than most phones I've used. It's no land-line, but as far as cell phones go, this one works quite well as just being a phone.

Why This Phone is so Fabulous - iTunes!!

Yup, you can sync this bad-boy with your iTunes library, which means that this phone does double duty as an iPod. It'll play all the same files that your iPod can play, including MP3s, AAC (the iTunes Music Store format), and even audio-books from Audible.com. Plus, if a call comes in while you're listening to your music, it'll pause the song and switch over to the phone. Press the answer button and it uses the headphones as a hands-free device. If you're using some other music player you might not even hear the phone ring.

There are two major flaws in the iPod functionality. One is that the memory card only holds 512MB (about 100 songs). If you're like me, you don't feel the need to carry around your entire music library with you everywhere you go. That said, 512MB fills up pretty quick. It's just right for a workout mix to take to the gym with you, or maybe a commute mix to listen to on the bus.

The other major flaw with the iTunes support is that it doesn't let you easily use your iTunes library for ring-tones. If you could easily load your iTunes songs as ring-tones, they wouldn't be able to sell you the latest Justin Timberlake ring-tones for $2.49 each in the MEdia Mall. Note that I said it doesn't let you easily use iTunes MP3s for ringtones. It can be done. The internal memory card is 5MB and is used to store ring-tones as well as pictures and video from the on board VGA camera. Since ringtones only use the first 30 seconds of any particular song, I recommend cropping your songs before using them as ring-tones. You can google around for detailed instructions but the gist of it is:
1) Connect the SLVR to your computer with the included USB cable
2) Navigate to the memory card and open the folder \Mobile\Audio
3) Drag and drop your cropped and compressed MP3 files into this folder.
4) Unplug USB cable and on the SLVR, go to My Stuff-> My Sounds
5) Press the menu button and switch the storage device to memory card
6) Select the MP3 of your choice, press menu, and move it to Phone. Repeat for as many ringtones as you like.
7) Switch your storage device back to the phone and you'll find the new MP3s in your ringtones library.

Why This Phone is so Fabulous - Lots of Nifty Features

You can check the weather, play games, it's even got voice dialing and speakerphone so you can make calls while driving without having to press buttons or hold the phone to your ear. It has bluetooth for wireless hands free talking. You can even sync your contacts from Apple addressbook using bluetooth and iSync. In the interest of keeping this already lengthy review at sub-novel length, I won't go into details on how to do all these things. You can find that online or in the manual. I will say that they all work as expected.

The Down Side - Crappy Battery Life

There's no way around this one. When a phone is this slim and lightweight, it's gonna have a tiny battery. Add on some awesome features and a nice bright LCD screen, your battery life goes to crap. I talk on my cell phone for maybe 20 minutes on an average day. This phone needs to be recharged every night. Forget to plug it in before you go to bed? You're without a phone for the day. I recommend you get a couple extra chargers for this bad boy. One for your car, and one to keep at work. That way you'll be less likely to get stuck without a phone.

The Down Side - Difficult User Interface

This was a really big one for me. As much time and money as the designers put into the look and feel of the SLVR and all the features, they really skimped on the UI. It's just not easy to use. The interface is not very intuitive and the menus are poorly labeled. For example, lets say your battery is low. Your phone will beep intermittently to alert you to this fact. The obvious solution is to turn off the phone, hence conserving battery life while simultaneously silencing the annoying beep. Try as you may, you will not find any button on the phone labeled as Power Off. Navigate through as many menus as you like, nowhere will it tell you how to turn off the phone. If you don't happen to know that holding down the red hang up button turns the phone off, you'll end up tearing out the battery to stop the annoying beeping. I don't like reading manuals, but if you're not accustomed to Motorola phones, you'll have to do some serious reading to use this phone. Another example, say you want to switch your phone from Ring Only (what my phone came with) to Ring & Vibrate, I had to navigate through 18 button presses, and that was once I'd figured out where they hid the command. Now every time I want to change the audio profile (say I want to switch it to silent or to vibrate only or to ring only), I have to navigate through all those menus. You can adjust the ringer volume with the buttons on the side of the phone, but there's no way to change the audio profile. I have to admit that this is my first Motorola phone. Being accustomed to the UI of the Treo and before that, a handful of Nokias, this was a tough transition. If you're accustomed to Motorola, you may find the UI easier to learn.

The Down Side - Crappy Camera

This is only a minor annoyance, as that I've never seen a cell phone camera that is useful for anything more than snapshots. That said, this camera is especially bad. The VGA resolution is so low that even your snapshots end up as tiny little postage-stamp sized images. There is a "zoom" feature as well. I put zoom in quotes because it doesn't actually zoom anything, it just crops out the part of your photo that you "zoom" into. In other words, zoom all the way in (4x) and it cuts the already small image down to 1/4 size, or 160 pixels by 120 pixels. For reference, the Epinions logo at the top of this page is 303 pixels wide.

Once you've taken your pictures, it's relatively easy to text-message or email them to your friends, set them as your phone's wallpaper, or even send them to your computer via bluetooth.

Summary

It's pretty and sleek. The voice quality is excellent. It's got lots of nifty features. The menus are hard to use and the battery life is pretty poor.

The fine print: My phone is a black Motorola L7 SLVR on the Cingular network. I used it for 3 months. This was my first time using a Motorola phone. If you've been using them forever you may not have any trouble with the user interface. Your mileage may vary. I hope this epinion is very helpful for you!