Motorola ROKR E8 Review

The Motorola ROKR E8 is a first-class music phone with a whopping 2GB of memory built in, and support for an additional 4GB memory card. It's a sleek, minimalist phone with a context-sensitive touchscreen that works very well. Other features include an FM radio, 2 megapixel camera, web browser, quadband and an excellent battery life. Highly recommended!

The ROKR series is Motorola's answer to Sony Ericsson's Walkman range, and is intended primarily as a music phone. Like the Samsung Soul and the LG Venus, the E8 features virtual touch-sensitive buttons, and menus that adapt to the function that you are currently using: phone, music player or imaging mode. This gives the phone a sleek minimalist appearance that definitely lends an edge when it comes to looks. The use of a haptic (i.e. vibration) touchscreen gives positive feedback to the on-screen menus, and makes the phone easy to use. Combining this with the FastScroll navigation wheel lets you use the music player functions with ease.

The phone is slim too, and weighs in at 106g, which is slightly heavier than average, but gives the phone a bit more "body", making it sit nicely in the hand.

The E8 majors in music, so lets take a look at what it can do. As we've already commented, the music player is very easy to use, with the combination of context-sensitive touchscreen controls and the FastScroll navigation wheel. You can easily create playlists on the go, whilst listening to music, and organizing your music and playlists is very easy with a drag-and-drop user interface. The phone is compatible with Windows Media Player 11, and Motorola have provided access to over 200 online music stores if you want to download music directly to your phone. An FM radio is also built into the phone. Audio quality is good and the music player supports all the common digital formats. Naturally,the E8 supports stereo Bluetooth headsets, and the use of a standard 3.5mm headphone jack means that you can connect your own headphones.

But perhaps the most exceptional feature of the E8 is its enormous memory capacity - up to 6 GB. The inbuilt memory is huge, at 2 Gbytes, and you can add a 4 Gbyte memory card if your music collection is big enough! This will give you enough storage for 1,500 MP3 tracks (more if compressed.) Motorola seem to have really over-delivered on memory, and we very much welcome this. Compare the 2GB of onboard memory with the pathetic 12 Mbytes of the Sony Ericsson W580i, or the paltry 30 Mbytes of the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic.

The ROKR E8 certainly delivers when it comes to music. It also includes most other essential features: a 2 megapixel camera with zoom but no flash, a video camera, a web browser, and email. The camera isn't brilliant, but remember that this is intended as a music phone. The E9 seems to work well as a phone too, with good reception and clear call quality. Motorola's CrystalTalk™ technology helps to improve voice clarity by reducing background noise. We'd also like to point out that the battery life is excellent too, despite the slimness of the phone.

We weren't expecting to be blown away by the ROKR E8, but in fact we're very impressed. Motorola have delivered a mid-range music phone that can easily hold its own against mid-range phones from the other manufacturers. It comes with exceptional storage capacity and delivers an innovative new user interface without any obvious glitches. Compared with similarly priced offerings from Sony Ericsson (W580i) and Nokia (5310 XpressMusic) we think that the ROKR E8 is the clear winner. Highly recommended!

Features of the Motorola ROKR E8 include:

• 2 megabyte camera with 8x digital zoom
• Video camera (176 x 144 pixels, 15 frames per second) with 4x digital zoom and video editor
• Display: 262K TFT, 240 x 320 pixels (2.0 inches)
• Music player (supports MIDI, MP3, AAC, AAC+, Enhanced AAC+, WMA, WAV, AMR-NB and Real Audio (RA) v10 formats)
• FM Radio
• Messaging: MMS, IM, SMS, Email
• Wallpaper, screensaver, customisable ringtones
• Voice dialling with user independent voice recognition
• Handsfree speakerphone
• Memory: 2 Gbytes plus memory card (up to 4 Gbytes)
• Connectivity: USB 2.0, Bluetooth, 3.5mm headphone jack
• Internet: GPRS Class 12, EDGE Class 12, HTML web browser
• Quadband
• Size: 115 x 53 x 10.6 mm
• Weight: 106g
• Talktime: 360 minutes
• Battery standby: 300 hours