Motorola L6 PINK

The Motorola L6 is part of the ever growing (or should that be shrinking?) range of slimline handsets. Measuring a flab-free 11 mm thick front to back, the L6 is one of the thinnest mobile phones ever, and weighing in at a mere 91 grams, one of the lightest as well.

In comparison to the similarly skinny RAZR phones it is not so wide, which will be a relief to some user's already taxed pockets, but it has managed to retain the same decent size screen as its older sibling. The L6 is also deceptively solid, despite its diminutive appearance. That's not to say you could throw the handset against the wall like the good old Nokia 3310's of yore, but the L6 does have a very solid and durable feel.

The keypad on the Motorola L6 is a slight re-imaging of the keypad from the RAZR. The buttons are all even and made from plastic, which does spoil the feel of the phone slightly. Texting is also an issue due to the poor feedback of the buttons. It does take more then adequate force to get the desired 'click' that registers that you have actually pressed a button. So you can imagine that writing a long drawn out text message can be a frustrating affair. They say the devil makes work for idle hands...

The menu is accessed via a four-way rocker button with a central selection key, along with four additional buttons for quick-access and two traditional call and cancel buttons. The VGA camera is adequate for casual snaps and fun videos, but not a patch on some of the more powerful cameraphones doing the rounds, and you certainly won't want to upload any shots taken anytime soon. The pixellated travesties that the L6 churns out certainly won't look good on your Facebook profile.

Unfortunately you won't be able to build up a sizeable photo album, up as the L6 is very low on internal memory. The number of pictures and videos you will be able to store on the L6 is also severely limited by the non-expandable 10MB-odd memory limit. The same goes for the music player – yes, the Motorola L6 does indeed sport an MP3 player, but the memory limit means that you'll be limited to uploading a few songs and audio files to be used as ringtones or text alerts.

This brings us neatly to the software onboard the L6. This is a bigger barrier to texting than the poor button feedback. As the number of characters in your text increases, the slower the message editor becomes. Its fine for short, sharp messages but anything more than that becomes a problem. Not only does the message editor become slow, all of the operating software seems to slow down to a crawl. The one compensation to this is that the L6 has an excellent backlight, which means texting in the dark is not an issue. A must when you consider it might be dark by the time you finish writing a message on the thing.

The L6 certainly has its fair share of minus points. The wafer thin premium looks certainly come at the cost of functionality. But if you are a person who would like a slim line phone that does the basics, the L6 won't disappoint. If, however you would like more bang for your buck, look elsewhere.