Motorola L7 SLVR review.

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I recently started on a mobile contract with o2 after being on their pay as you go plan for a year or so, and as part of that I was given a new mobile phone for free. I chose the Motorola L7 SLVR in red, mainly because it seemed like a good cause, rather than for the phone itself (my first mistake, right there).

Within a few days, the middle button fell out while I was texting somebody. That was my first annoyance with it. The second was that while checking my emails to try out the internet browsing feature, I found that while writing an email using it there was no way of changing it from the frustrating predictive text to just regular button pressing. Again, only a minor annoyance, but it'd probably annoy me more if I was planning on using the Internet for it (although, of course, it is possible that it may be due to Gmail, not the phone itself). It's also very easily scratched, and I find it frustrating that I can't keep mobile, work and home phone numbers in the same entry. Although you can give them the same names, and when they're saved the phone memory you can have symbols next to the person's name, but it was still a disappointment.

Next, the camera. I didn't really know what a 'VGA' camera was, but assumed it would be fairly good. This is a modern phone, right? They all come with about a 2 megapixel camera these days, right? Ha. Other than Motorola's phones, it seems. VGA is actually less than a megapixel (more like .5 of a megapixel), which, considering it doesn't have flash either, puts it pretty low in the competition. I was incredibly disappointed with the quality of the camera - even my sister's older Nokia takes better photos! I'm not planning on using the camera very much, but it'd be nice to have the option of occasionally sending quick snapshots to friends while I'm out and about.

Motorola have spared no expenses with this phone, it would appear. Don't expect to get anything free. The games are demos - you have to buy them to play the complete version. You don't get a hand's free headset free. You don't get a wire to connect it to your computer, either. Or the iTunes software for transferring music onto it. It only comes with 6mb of memory - if you want more, you have to buy it (the option for expanding the memory, however, is about the phone's only bonus).

The phone's main selling point is the 'Red' brand. Like the RAZR, however, that's no excuse for Motorola to use only the basics to make a phone that, frankly, doesn't live up to the hype.