Motorola Slvr L7 review

Furthermore, it is easy to twiddle the exposure using the navigation pad, and to use the 4x digital zoom with the pad, but there's no flash which makes shooting in low light conditions, including indoors, hit and miss.

When it comes to music, ignore any rumours that the Slvr has the iTunes software installed, because that is certainly not the case in the UK. There is a music player though, and it sent reasonable quality sound to the handset's speaker and good quality sound to the provided stereo headset -- just as well as its mini USB connector means you can't use your own favourite headset.

When music is playing, the navigation pad lets you pause/resume and flick through songs. The main irritation is that the moment you switch out of the player to access another application playback stops. When you take a call playback manages to stop and start again automatically.

Storage of tunes and pictures relies on microSD cards, as there is an extremely meagre 5MB of built-in memory.

As for the rest of the features, an address book, diary, calculator, alarm clock, email support and picture viewer are included, as well as a couple of games and a Java application which will backup over the air. These are all fine as far as they go, but with no out of the box ability to share information with your PC, some of them, for example the diary and contact book, might take a bit of initial setting up.

Performance
We had no real issues with the Slvr in terms of performance. Once you understand that this is not intended to be a leading-edge handset, it does a good job. Sound quality during calls was perfectly acceptable, and during music playback was impressive.

We got away with three days of average use before needing to recharge, though if you like to use a Bluetooth headset you'll need to recharge the battery more frequently.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield