Motorola ROKR E8 Cell Phone

Introduction

The world of phone technology has reached a point where the phones change on a day to day basis. What is the latest and greatest today might be the outdated technology that will be given away to anyone for free just for signing a contract with a carrier tomorrow. The way to defeat the aging process the phone makers try to do what everyone else in the technology industry try to do. Make the phones do many things to many people. Email, Bluetooth, Internet, MMS, SMS, you name it and the new phones probably has it. The price of packing so much technology into a phone comes at a price. The price usually comes as increased battery consumption, bulkier phone, or a heavier phone. The folks at Motorola understood this issue and decided to make a more focused phone – a phone that is mainly meant to be a phone and music player. Have they achieved what they were looking for? Or is the  Motorola ROKR E8 is not the phone it was designed to be: a “phonepod”.

Specifications

This list might look crowded and maybe intimidating to some, however, after taking a closer look at it there are only a couple of things that are special to this particular phone. First of all it is important to know that this is a haptic response phone. This means that this phone has no actual keys to press. Instead the ROKR has touch sensitive keys and when pressed the phone will vibrate to simulate the key-pressed response. Another important thing to note that this phone is only EDGE Class 1 and 2. Meaning that if you get this phone unlocked and take it to an ATT provide you should not expect 3G speeds. Other important specs to be noted is that he phone has an SD card slot and is Video capable. The addition of these features makes the phone more competitive in today’s market.

Packaging

Front of the box	Back of the box

The box itself is very conservative featuring the standard T-Mobile colors: red on white. In the front of the box you can see a picture of the phone while on back you back you have a list of the main features of the phone. After opening the box, the first thing that I was presented was the phone itself as can be seen in the picture below.

Top of the inside of the box	Underneath the phone

At this point I could not help but stare at the beauty that lay there right in front of my eyes. The phone is polished black with which gives it a finesse that make it look like some of the most expensive phones out there. This is definitely a phone that would make you feel bad if dropped it. After picking it up for a minute and taking a closer look, I realized that there were no buttons on it. This may not come to you as a surprise, but it was definitely one of features that gave me pleasant surprise. The phone is based on a haptic response. This means that every time you touch a button, the phone will vibrate imitating the feel of pressing a button. This is the simple way that Motorola got people that “Like buttons on their phone” to use the technology of a touchscreen.

As any normal consumer who has gone through at least a couple of phones, I did not expect the packaging of this phone to be any different from the packaging of any other phone. And it wasn’t. From the top down you have the standard user’s manual, driver CD, headphones/mic, battery, phone, case, USB cable, and a charger. Surprisingly enough the ROKR did come with a micro SD card and an adapter, but the SD card was only 1 GB.

Phone

The main features of the  Motorola ROKR E8 are the ability to play music and the ipod-like interface. Unfortunately the ROKR only comes with 2 GB of internal storage so you would not be able to fit too many songs in the phone without using an SD Card. Luckily Motorola has already thought of that and decided to integrate a micro-SD card slot into the phone. That is all dandy with only one rather significant problem. According to the manufacturer’s specifications, the phone can only have up to 4 GB of SD storage. This means that putting an SD card that is larger than 4 GB in the slot would be completely useless and the maximum amount of space you will have is 6 GB.

Phone Back	SD and SIM Cards

That being said, the ipod-like interface works very well when it comes to music. Although the touch bar does not make the complete circle like it does in the traditional ipod, it does pick up the speed of your fingers and adjusts accordingly while listing through the songs. If you wanted to go from the beginning of the playlist to the the end very quickly all that you would have to do is rotate your hand towards the extreme right of the semicircle using your finger with a faster than average speed. While browsing contacts, however, this feature is not as efficient as I would have liked it to be.

Activation

Unlike the CDMA phones, activating a GSM phone is fairly easy. All you have to do is take your SIM card out of the old phone and slide it into the new phone. If you card is password protected, the password for the new phone will be the same as the old phone’s. The card will work automatically and there is no need to call the carrier company to inform them that you are using the new phone. This is already assuming the phone is either unlocked or made to be used with your current carrier. In this case the phone was made to work with T-Mobile and I am using T-Mobile service.

Main Menu

The main screen of the phone looks pretty harmless. It shows you which carrier you are connected to, the time, battery, alarm, messages and ring style and shortcut and main menu links. As you can see from the images below all of the icons and shortcuts are located on the edges of the screen which gives the “Desktop” the appearance of not being crowded.After clicking on the main menu link you are taken into a graphical / image hybrid main menu list. You can scroll though this menu by using the touch wheel or by using the right and left buttons. Scrolling through this menu appeared to be graphically intensive since the phone took an extra second after I clicked to display the next menu option.

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Camera and Video

The phone’s 2 MP camera shoot excellent images when considering that it is a phone camera we are talking about. So long that you are taking a picture in a well illuminated place the camera will do a great job, however, if you try to deviate into darker areas or areas with artificial lighting you will start to see that there is a slight “yellowish” tone to the pictures. The video mode has two resolutions Small and Large. These resolutions are 96 x 128 pixels and 144 x 176 pixels respectively. These size are available in 3 different quality settings: Good, Better, Best. In the Best setting and on the highest resolutions the video takes up approximately 171 KB for an 8 second video.

MP3s

Regardless of whether I was using the headphones or the internal speaker of the phone, I was always left with amazement at the quality at which the phone was able to output the playback. The internal speaker was loud enough to be able to hear it from at least 20 ft away in a quiet room but still had enough base and texture to the sound to eliminate most of the annoying high pitch notes.

Unlike the traditional ipod menus which are black on white with a blue selection highlight, the Motorola ROKR E8 follows the phone theme. The letters are white on a black background and the highlight is red. Despite being black, the menus are still visible in sunlight. The phone also provides you with the basic settings as any ipod. You can select from organizing your songs by Artist, Album, All Songs, Recently Played, Shuffled, or Playlists which can be created to include anything you have on the phone.

Music Menu – Key Layout	Regular – Key Layout

While in music mode or media mode the numbers used for dialing have all been turned off and the only things that are visible are the arrow signs, the scrolling touch wheel, the selection, and the answer call/ end call buttons. When looking at the songs, you can use either the touch wheel or the multidirectional pad that is in the middle to browse your way to the songs you want to play. The whole “changing” experience does take a toll on the phone, however. If happen to receive a phone call while a song is playing, you will feel at least 1 second delay between you the phone showing a call and actually ringing and then another 1 second delay after you pressed the “Answer” button and the person on the line hearing your voice.

SongID

SongID is a feature that no good phonepod could go without. Say you are traveling on the road, listening to the radio and all of a sudden a jam that you just can’t ignore comes onto the radio. Obviously you have no idea what song it is and until now you had to just memorize the lyrics so that you can do research on the song at home. Well this application is designed to do just that. SongID will do the homework for you so that you can go on with your life as nothing happened. All you have to do is put the phone next to the speaker, hit “Listen” and wait while the phone does its internet magic and locates the name and the artist of your new and possibly favorite jam. That being said, SongID is data-based application so you would have to have internet service with T-Mobile if you are going to use this service.

Alarms

I have always been picky about the alarms that come with the phones. The problem is either there are too many options and you do not know what to choose from or there are not enough options and you can not set it up to whatever you want it to, or the phone speaker is just not loud enough to wake you up. This is not the case with this phone. The Motorola ROKR E8 offers up 3 completely programmable alarms which can go off on any day of the week and if need-be have them recur every week. In additional 3 alarms, there are 2 quick pick options. You can select the 30 minute alarm if you are taking a power nap or the 1 hour alarm if you are taking a siesta. The tones for the alarms are completely programmable, but I found out that the pre-programmed ones are more than annoying enough to wake me up.

Battery Life

There is enough charge in the phone to last you at least the whole day even if you are keen on using the MP3 features in addition to just talking and texting. That being said, however, because the phone is made by Motorola it will give off the nasty “bleep” when the battery is in the last 10% or so. It will continue doing so every 2-5 minutes until you either put the phone in the charger or turn it off or kill yourself (in which case it will still beep but you won’t care). Thus if you are traveling and plugging in the phone is not an options, I suggest you brace yourselves as it will annoy you like there is no tomorrow.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, did the Motorola ROKR E8 make it out to be what it was made for? Yes. Despite having a couple of issues and the severely limiting factor of the memory this phone will do everything any avid music listener would want. It would also take a pic or video that could be you-tube worthy. By having a phone with a phone with a purpose, Motorola managed to keep the ROKR E8 exciting while at the same time as simple as possible. That, in my opinion, is what made the phone into a worthwhile investment of $99 with a 2 year contract from T-Mobile.

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