This candy bar offers up sweet, slim style, along with features like a VGA camera, conference calling and Bluetooth. Does this fashionable phone belong alongside your couture?
Review summary of the Motorola L6:
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 The Motorola L6 features an attractive finish and slim form factor, making it a nice option for the fashion conscious. Chatters will also appreciate the candy bar's solid talk time and variety of calling features including Bluetooth, a speaker phone and conference calling. However, we were annoyed by the lack of dedicated volume keys and the phone's tiny keypad, which made typing difficult. We were also disappointed by the phone's low resolution screen and sub-par call quality. Release: December 2006.
Pros: Sleek, slim design; solid conference calling abilities; respectable talk time.
Cons: Lousy display; muffled calls; no dedicated volume keys; small, uncomfortable keypad.
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67%
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Full Motorola L6 Review:
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Design
The slim (0.4 inches), eye-catching Motorola L6 looks great thanks to its brushed metallic finish, but all that metal weighs down the handset (3.1 ounces). The candy bar's low-resolution display is just shy of two inches, but comes saddled with a noticeable screen-door effect. However, our biggest complaint with the L6's design is the lack of dedicated volume keys. We tried to adjust the volume by going through the phone's audio menu but only found ringtone settings. After searching in the manual we discovered that the left and right arrow keys adjust the volume, but when the phone's Web ticker is running (a nice feature that displays news, weather and sports headlines on the standby screen) the arrow keys control the ticker. The L6 also features a VGA camera, which is the key difference between this handset and Motorola's L2.
Calling - Good
Call quality was average on the L6; during our tests in Manhattan, we heard static and our calls sounded muffled and distant despite solid reception. The phone does offer the standard array of calling features including Bluetooth, a speakerphone and voice tagging, as well as conference calling for up to five people. The L6 also allows you to navigate between calls by separating them from the conference; this required a bit of menu drilling, however. Also, the candy bar's phonebook doesn't support while-you-type searching, meaning you better get acquainted with the arrow keys, or you can use the menu's search tool. The phone does score a few points with its solid battery life; we got about four hours of talk time, which is a little short of Cingular's specs.
Messaging - Good
Messaging was rather uncomfortable and tedious on the L6's tiny, asymmetrical keypad. Even worse, the phone's erratic iTAP predictive text feature regularly coughed up off-base suggestions that were slow in coming; we often finished typing our words before a prediction showed up. At least we were able to fit a respectable 117 characters on outgoing texts, and about 119 characters on incoming messages -- decent, but short of our preferred 160 characters. The L6 also offers up instant messaging with support for AIM, MSN and Yahoo, along with e-mail support for AIM, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, and SBC Yahoo. They all worked nicely, but it did take a good 45 seconds for the application to load.
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Price and availability
The Motorola L6 is available immediately from Cingular for free with a two-year service contract.
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