Motorola SLVR L7e (MOTOSLVR L7e)

Expected Q4 2006
29th October 2006

"I Hate Myself and Want to Die" is a Nirvana song featured in the book I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard. It's also a T-Shirt featured at the extremely funny Engrish.com web site (you can buy it too).

Why do we mention this song? Well, for some reason the song title popped into our heads when Motorola announced the Motorola SLVR L7e (also known as the MOTOSLVR L7e), yet another member of the interminable Motorola RAZR/SLVR series of attractive but incredibly tedious phones.

Yes.. it's the old Motorola SLVR L7 reheated and re-served as a new.. or newish.. phone. There used to be a time when Motorola had a range of handsets, but now.. well.. everything they announced seems to be a rehash of what went before.

Perhaps we are being cruel - in fact, the original SLVR was a nice looking device and it's one of those phones that's nice to hold, and it's an attractive designed unit too. The Motorola SLVR L7e tweaks the design slightly with a keypad very similar to the Motorola KRZR K1 clamshell, and the result is very pleasing to look at. The SLVR L7e also boosts the camera resolution from a poor 0.3 megapixels to a just-about-adequate 1.3 megapixels. The display is still a 176x220 pixel panel, there's microSD expandable memory, Bluetooth and an MP3 player.

Under the hood, there are some more improvements to the SLVR - it can take up to 2Gb of microSD memory, it now comes with stereo Bluetooth and the SLVR L7e is now a quad-band GSM phone with EDGE high-speed data. The software in the L7e has been overhauled too, and overall the entire phone seems to have been subtly upgraded in one way or another.

Overall, this is much better version of the SLVR than the original one which was announced nearly two years ago. The unique selling proposition of the L7e is looks rather than features, but the feature set has been updated to something a little more contemporary and overall it's quite a nice package. Motorola say that the SLVR L7e should be available before the end of the year.

But... please, Motorola.. try to come up with something a little more original next time.

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