Jan 11, 2007 05:45 PM
2783 Views
Supposedly thats what the motorola L 7s dimensions are said to be inspired from, a monolith in the movie A space odessy ( pardon if I got the spelling wrong). A month after its launch , and being a staunch nokia fan, I was the proud owner of a L 7, and 6 months of using it for nothing much, I sold it. Im not the kind who changes phones every few months, my last phone lasted me 11 months, nearly a year till it went bust. I was really lookin for a v3i, and found this a more recent addition to the phones in the market, and the only thing it gave away to the V3i, was the camera resoultion, this being a vga 640x480. A very stylish and slim phone to look at, with the embossed keypad, that has a very weird tendency to light up or go out at its own will. I upgraded the memory card to a 512 mb card, and no hanging problems or anything, but by then that was what it was being primarily used as, a music phone.
The pictures are average, no great shakes about it. the video playback does have a problem, the phone responding very slowly if a high resolution mp4 video was played. Another problem was, the size of the video playback, was very very small, and one could not scroll forward in a video, if there was a 5 min song, then thats what you will have to do, watch it from the first second to the last, no fast forwarding in it.
The data interface was easy, the phone being detected even without its driver cd, and even can be charged on the usb cable attached to the pc. but the data transfer rate is slow, it seems better to take the memory card out, put it in a card reader and then transfer it. The rubber cover of the memory card sticks out a little if opened and closed too frequently, and can really spoil the look.
One drawback is, the port for the headphones, the charger, the data cable is one. I konw it simplifies the design, and gives a clutter free look, but the problem is if you wanna talk on the hands free and charge at the same time, or listen to music.
The speaker phone is average, but the sound quality very decent, tho sound never distorting once.
One interesting thing I discovered was that mp4 audio was also supported, which really reduces the file size. Mp3 audio was supported only till 192 kbps, so various songs had to be re-encoded to be compatible, which is good, becaues it helps save space also.
I found a lot of java utilities for the L 7 on line, but probably less than half would work on it.
The talk time, etc were average, one problem was the network strength was really bad, at the same spot compared to a basic nokia 1110 on the same sim, and same provider.
Charging did take a long time, atleast 2 hrs, but it was really weird, because the battery meter was not too helpful.
If you try and transfer images or wallpapers from any other mobile via bluetooth, or even from a pc via datacable, make sure the resolution is either 640x480 or below, because that is what it supports. Any file larger in size, will just come with an error, file too large to open, and it cannot be resized either for viewing, this being a serious limitation to the capabilities of this phone.
Video recording was at par with other phones, recording a max of 1 min clips.
The key pad, is very prone to scratches, even from nails. You may not see it head on, but tilting the phone so as to reflect light off the keypad, you will find a lot of minute scratches after a few weeks of use. I covered it with normal wide clear tape and it took care of the scratches.
On the whole a okay phone, but I never got used to the t9 input in it, and dialing numbers without paying too much attention was a problem as the keys could never be distinguished properly.
I finally sold the phone after 5 months for 5k, and to my luck a week after sellin it the L7i was launched, which has supposedly solved many of the problems in the L7
