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THE new Motorola L7 mobile phone is cool, compact and—for some reason known only to the tech company’s designers in Schaumburg, Illinois— it attracts paper clips.

Motorola also calls the latest of its razor-thin phones “Slvr” (pronounced “sliver,” not “silver”). With it, the company hopes to snag mobile users who don’t like clamshell units like the now iconic “Razr.” The L7/Slvr is a candy-bar phone, meaning all its main features are on one side, where the screen is also located.

The new phone is a worthy successor of the Razr, the phone credited with the resurrection of the once-moribund company’s wireless unit. It’s thinner than its clamshell predecessor and even more stylish.

The one-piece etched, high-polish, backlit keypad is now in full display, and Motorola promises that both the brilliant LCD screen and the VGA camera behind the phone are scratch-resistant.

The rest of the phone is protected by a metal-like alloy that feels substantial and sturdy without being too heavy (the company says that because of the L7’s ultra-thin profile, designers just couldn’t use hard plastic).

At P15,000 retail, the Slvr makes an excellent phone for the sort of people who fell in love with the Razr—mobile users who want something that’s stylish, not too expensive but still loaded with enough extras that can come in handy like a still and video camera, an MP3 player and a Bluetooth connection.

Alas, perhaps because of its compact size or its midprice range (or probably because of both factors), the L7 cannot have all of the goodies in amounts that feature-spoiled mobile users have come to expect from their phones. The camera shoots way below megapixel quality, memory cannot be expanded beyond half a gigabyte and side-by-side Bluetooth receive/transmit comparisons with other phones leave the Slvr in the dust.

Still, people who like the upsized features in their more expensive phones will find that the Slvr is a very stylish second phone. People who use their mobile phones mostly for calling and texting will find the Slvr more than adequate—and cool.

Oh, and about those paper clips: The Slvr’s lower end does attract them, for some reason. Then again, so does the Razr.