A year after the Motorola RAZR V3 (well, actually, 10 months after that), the phone costs almost 1/3rd its original Rs. 29,995 price tag and still manages to wow the commonfolk. There’s still no other phone in the market that’s as thin and cool looking. Features wise it was a bummer with just around 5.5MB of memory on board and no memory card slot, but that didn’t manage to cause a dent in its popularity. Now, Motorola is at it again with the launch of the L6 SLVR the much anticipated candy bar RAZR. Is it as smooth and sharp as the RAZR? Or is it just eye candy?

Well, at only 1.1cm in thinness vs. the RAZR’s 1.4cm, the L6 is actually slimmer than the RAZR. But when compared to most other popular candy bar category phones, this may seem a little long and wide. In spite of that, it just slides into any pocket. It weighs only 80g, making it a bit lighter than the RAZR. In the sleekness department, there’s simply no room to cut any points. The L6 is slick. But only if you’re a candy bar form factor. I personally prefer either a clamshell or a slider; I stay away from swivels and candies.

It still doesn’t let go of any of the RAZR’s popular features: you get a VGA camera (sadly no 1.3MP), Bluetooth and of course, stares from everyone around you. New in this phone is the addition of EDGE support, Push-to-Talk and an upgraded memory storage of 10MB as opposed to the chintzy 5.5MB that the RAZR managed. Fortunately, they aren’t advertising the ability to playback MP3 ringtones as “MP3 playback”, leading people to believe that it has an MP3 player built in.

One of the things I really loved about the RAZR was the keypad. Its beautifully crafted, circularly brushed metal finish put it in a class of its own. One touch and the grooves marking the keys light up uniformly, giving a new meaning to cool. There is nothing like this in the L6. The L6 keypad is regular matte metal finish with no concentric circles like the RAZR. The keypad is also not just one metal strip like the RAZR, it’s a regular keypad with distinct buttons. The buttons are too thin, requiring thumb-typing, and the angle of the first and last row just make typing on this a headache. If your have larger hands, its impossible to press just one number key at a time on this phone. To top it off, the cracks in the keypad (space between the keys) glow in an irregular, nasty, super bright 12V LED style light that just hurts the eyes. The five-way navigation pad on this phone still has the brushed finish of the RAZR, though.

he display on the L6 is a lot smaller than the RAZR. If they had kept the resolution the same at 176×220, it would have looked sharp and fabulous. But the display on the L6 is a mere 120×160 and its even 30% larger than most standard 120×160 resolution displays (like the Samsung SGH-E630, for example). This big size and low resolution combination makes the display look very blocky and dull, in spite of being a 262k color screen.

The VGA camera we mentioned earlier is also a miss in the L6. The quality of the pictures cannot be compared to the Nokia 6600. The pictures come out extremely blurred and daylight shots are overexposed. The only good thing about the camera is the placement. It is placed very high up on the top of the rear side, so there’s absolutely no way your fingers will come in the way, unless you clutch to the phone like its going to fly out of your hands.

The battery on the L6 lasted for one week with two recharges and a very low amount of talk. Even when it finally made it to the red, it was live for several hours with constant warning beeps going off every now and then. I didn’t have any complaints in the battery department of the L6.

This phone sells for an introductory price of Rs. 8,905, and you can actually get your hands on it for around Rs. 8,500. Now, this may sound like a decent deal, however, that’s only if you’re looking primarily at the style factor. If you’re looking for features, the K700i, which sells for around the same price, comes with a better camera with flash, 41MB of memory with a proper MP3 player and proper, crystal clear sound as compared to the 22KHz speaker on the L6. That’s the one we recommend. On the other hand, even if you’re primarily looking at style, the erstwhile cool RAZR V3 now sells for Rs. 10,700 (the cheapest I could find). For Rs. 2,200 extra, I’d say the RAZR is a much better style statement than the L6. But if you still prefer candies to clams, then go for the L6, or wait for the L7 which has a TransFlash/microSD slot and a better RAZR-like keypad…