mobiles: Motorola ROKR E8

The Motorola ROKR E8 is a stylish and trendy handset which is adorned with various innovative features to enhance the wireless communication of the users. This tempting handset weighs just 100 gms and has a dimension of merely 115 x 53 x 10.6 mm. Its touch sensitive keypad would help you to access the menus very comfortably. The intuitive navigation scroll wheel has been beautifully embedded in this gadget. With the enhanced connectivity options like GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth etc, one can enjoy the liberty of receiving and transferring the multimedia contents from other compatible systems. A 2 mega pixel camera is embedded in this handset which can efficiently capture images with a resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels. With the 2 GB internal memory you would never face the storage capacity constraints. The built in handsfree, music player, calculator and FM radio are some of the efficient features incorporated in this mobile phone. The standard Li-Ion 970 mAh (BK60) battery can support upto 5 hours of talktime and 300 hours of standby time.

Music, of course, is a central theme here but the E8's real news lies with its unique "ModeShift" technology. Instead of traditional keypad and navigation array, the Rokr features a smooth "glasslike" surface with touch-pad controls that digitally "morph" depending on how the handset is used. As you shift from phone to music to imaging modes, the backlight on the control changes to illuminate only the relevant buttons for your current function. The E8 also features Motorola's first Haptics keypad with vibrating feedback and a "FastScroll" navigation wheel that makes it pretty seamless to navigate through long playlists. It's not a complete circle but it's pretty user-friendly.

Loading songs on the E8 is also supposed to be fast and easy via a USB connection to a PC. Moto said that over the next year it would introduce more music phones like the E8 that would be better than standalone music players. That's a bold prediction, we can't wait to test it out. We have to say, however, that Moto seems to have succeeded at integrating the ergonomics of an MP3 player and a cell phone into one device.

Other features on the candy bar device include a Linux/Java OS, support for Windows Media Player 11, a large (2-inch) 262,000-color display, 2GB internal memory, stereo Bluetooth, USB 2.0, Moto's CrystalTalk technology (like we saw on the Razr2 series), an external memory card slot, a 2-megapixel camera, a digital-music player, and a full HTML browser. The quad-band world phone supports GPRS and EDGE networks, and it offers a "talking phone" to read your text messages while dialing a number or receiving a call. We haven't had the chance to test that particular feature yet, but it looks fun.

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