The Slvr looks superb and the software still lets it down

The Slvr is a Razr that has been unfolded and flattened, and I mean that as a description rather than a criticism, though I am aware it reads as one.

At 11.5mm the L7 is genuinely thin for a candybar, and it feels considerably better in a hand than the numbers suggest, because a flat slab of that thickness distributes its weight in a way a clamshell never does. Motorola’s industrial design team remains the best in this industry and nobody is especially close. The metal keypad, the proportions, the way the thing looks on a table next to a Nokia: all of it is right.

Then you turn it on.

Motorola’s software is where its phones go to disappoint you, and it has been true for years now with no apparent institutional embarrassment about it. Menus that respond a beat late. An address book that fights you. A messaging interface that feels assembled rather than designed. This is a company that can machine an anodised aluminium keypad to a tolerance nobody asked for and cannot make a contacts list open quickly, and the imbalance between those two competences is genuinely strange to sit with.

The iTunes edition is the version worth talking about, because it is the second attempt at something that already failed once. The ROKR put Apple’s software on a Motorola phone last year and capped it at a hundred songs for reasons that were commercial rather than technical, and it was received about as warmly as it deserved. The Slvr version raises the ceiling and improves the hardware around it, and it still is not going to work, because the fundamental problem was never the cap. The problem is that you load music onto it by plugging it into a computer and waiting, and the device you are competing with is an iPod that does the same thing but is also a much better music player made by the company that wrote the software.

Apple has no incentive to make this good. Every phone that plays iTunes music adequately is an iPod that does not get sold. Anybody expecting a great Apple music experience on somebody else’s hardware is misreading who benefits.

The larger worry is portfolio strategy, and this is the thing I keep circling back to whenever Motorola announces anything. Look at what the company has shipped since the Razr landed: a thinner Razr, a coloured Razr, the Pebl, the Slvr, and now a Krzr on the way. Every one of them is the same design language, the same materials, the same idea executed at a slightly different aspect ratio. It has worked spectacularly and it is one taste cycle from not working at all, because the entire proposition is that the phone looks good, and looking good is the one attribute with a guaranteed expiry date.

Nokia sells forty phones because it does not know which one you want. Motorola sells one phone in five shapes because it is certain it does. When the fashion turns, and it always turns, Nokia loses a product line and Motorola loses a company.

Buy the Slvr if you want the best-looking phone in the shop and you use your phone to make calls and send texts. That is not faint praise. It is most people. Just do not buy it expecting the music thing to change your life, and do not expect the software to stop annoying you, because Motorola has had years to fix that and has instead spent them making the hardware thinner.