Motorola ROKR E8

Guide price: £150.00

Slim Music Phone, with touch sensitive keypad. Extremely slim and svelte, this phone does have the wow factor on the looks front, it also has the storage capacity, with 2GB of onboard memory (1500 songs) and a card slot that supports MicroSD cards of 4GB capacity(3000 songs)! This makes it very attractive to people with large music collections and people who need a convergence phone, i.e. only one gadget in your pocket/handbag not two!

Straight out of the box the ROKR is rather featureless, the black glossy surface is relieved only by a crescent and circle of chrome and lines of raised black bumps, but turn it on (it has stainless steel side buttons and a slider for on/off and keypad lock) and all is revealed in all it's pale 'duck egg blue' glory, the small 2" screen glows into life, the crescent becomes a touch sensitive mode dial and the keypad is backlit. The screen is a very nice high resolution TFT, but it is far too small for the phones capabilities and other mobile manufacturers are offering at least 3.5" screens at this price point, viewing web pages, photos and videos is utterly useless on this size unit, even though the screen is at least bright and crisp.

On the test Bluetooth totally refused to send any data to my Mac, although all other Motorola phones have worked perfectly with my Apple computers, this I hope was a software glitch and not likely to effect communication with Windows computers, I also wanted to test it's stereo Bluetooth music streaming with a Sony wireless speaker and it did eventually work, which was good because the built in speaker is not very powerful at all. This Motorola does however with some nice sounding earbuds, with a cube speaker, for use as a speakerphone and the sound is again good.

Crystal talk technology works superbly well and all the calls I made on test were clear, distortion and crackle free. You can always rely on a Motorola for great call quality.

The 2.0mp camera is way below the 5 megapixel offerings on many other competitors mobiles, but the photos are surprisingly good, exhibiting superb, colourful, sharp pictures and very reasonable video clips. Take a closer look at the ROKR sample photo and see how well it holds up against the oppositions larger sensor equipped cameras.

Hilary's Conclusion: A nice music phone, let down by a small screen and a hit and miss touch sensitive keypad, one minute it's over sensitive the next completely unresponsive! Onboard storage is generous, call quality is excellent the camera is good but that's it!

Battery life:
talk time 7.0 hours
standby 12.0 days
weight: 105g

features:
2 Megapixel camera
Bluetooth technology
CrystalTalk
EDGE
email
external memory MicroSD
FastScroll
FM Radio
GPRS
ModeShift
MP3 & AAC player
MP3 ringtones
navigation scroll wheel
polyphonic ring tones
pop3/imap4 email
speaker phone
touch control
touch-sensitive keypad
USB compatible
vibrating alert
video capture
Video playback