 The Motorola ROKR EM30 is a baby cousin for the Motorola ROKR E8, and the family resemblance is easy to see. The mode-shifting keypad is there, which shifts from a cool blue set of numeric keys for dialing to a bright red set of music keys for media playback. From there, the ROKR EM30 eschews some of the gimmicks we didn't love on the ROKR E8. The touch sensitive scroll wheel is gone, replaced by a standard 4-way button, and the haptic feedback has been replaced by real buttons, which is an improvement in our books. Otherwise, in person the ROKR EM30 looks and feels very much like the ROKR E8. It's a fairly thick slab phone, about the thickness of Motorola's Q9 devices, if not more thick. We would have liked to see some more improvements in the interface design, especially considering this phone hasn't yet been tied down to any carriers with restrictive requirements, but instead the EM30 gets a fairly plain-looking interface, with a basic media player. Pricing and availability have yet to be announced, but we suspect this won't make its way to our shores anytime soon, unless T-Mobile really loved the original enough to offer a bargain model. Release: September 2008. Price: $250.
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