Find out why this new music phone gave our editor, Philip Berne, the heebie-jeebies in our in-depth Motorola ROKR E8 review.
Review summary of the Motorola ROKR E8:
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 If you're looking for a good music phone on T-Mobile, check out the Nokia 5310 Xpress Music phone, which was slim and responsive with great dedicated music keys, instead of the Motorola ROKR E8, which has no keys at all. There wasn't much to like about this phone. The menus were a jumbled mess; the music player was hurt by the strange scroll wheel design and slow hardware; and, to be frank, the touch-panel-that-feels-like-buttons kind of creeped us out. This is a gimmicky phone, and though we have nothing but compliments for the great call quality and loads of onboard storage, the overall experience isn't worth putting up with. Plus, the phone will retail at launch for $200, the price of an iPhone, when better music phones can be had on T-Mobile for much less. Release: July 2008. Price: $200.
Pros: Unique design for true button-haters. Great call quality. Good battery life. Lots of onboard memory.
Cons: Touch instead of buttons doesn't make this phone better. Poor menu design. Strange scroll 'crescent.' Unresponsive controls hamper music experience.
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Full Motorola ROKR E8 Review:
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Design - Mediocre
The first time we used the Motorola ROKR E8, we didn't realize that there were no real buttons on its face. It has a number pad and a four-way navigational 'button,' and dialing on the phone feels like pressing down number keys. But the phone forgoes buttons for touch, and to enhance the experience Motorola has added what feels like a localized haptic feedback. In other words, when you press the number 8, you get a slight buzz, more like a click, really, where the number 8 button should be. The effect is spot on, which is why it feels so creepy. There is something disconcerting about it, like the phone has entered the uncanny valley between touch and traveling keys, and the effect is even more strange the first time you try to press a button when the phone has gone to sleep, only to realize that the button was never really there.
Why bother? Why make a phone that uses touch and vibration to feel like real buttons? Why not just use real buttons? The phone pulls off one neat trick. When you switch to the music player mode, the phone buttons hide and all you can see are the relevant keys to control music playback. Same goes for the camera mode. The effect seemed gimmicky to us, and not nearly as cool or useful as the contextual touchscreen space on a phone like the LG Venus, which can adapt to any application.
The Motorola ROKR E8 is a black (or is that deep, dark blue?) obelisk, almost featureless when it's off, save for the crescent-shaped touch wheel. It's not actually a wheel because it doesn't go all the way around, it's open at the bottom. If you keep your finger at the edge of the "wheel," you get a faster scroll through the lists, but again we don't think this feature would be necessary if Moto had simply included a nice, full wheel. The wheel itself was very difficult to use. In some applications, like browsing the phone's menus or the music lists, the wheel seemed so sensitive that it was nearly impossible to choose correctly on the first try. In others, like the Web browser, the wheel seemed sluggish and unresponsive.
The menu interface is also a mess of a unnecessary submenus and poor organization. E-mail is available under the messaging menu and also under the IM and E-mail menu, though the latter's the only place you'll find Instant Messaging. Many of the submenus only have one choice underneath, which is the epitome of poor hierarchical organization. Worst of all, the most important features are often buried under layers of menus and were difficult to find the first or even second time we looked.
Calling - Very good
Nothing is more important to us than call quality, and we're happy to report that the Motorola ROKR E8 did make calls that sounded great. The phone uses Motorola's Crystal Talk technology, and voices sounded very clear in conversations in our office and on the street. Callers reported unusually good quality as well. Reception was a strange issue. The phone would dip into "Emergency Calls Only" territory, then bounce back to four bars even while we were standing in place. Regardless, when we had enough reception to complete a call, it always sounded great. For battery life, we got just over 6 hours of talk time in a single call, which is pretty good.
The Motorola ROKR E8 has a nice address book with plenty of fields. It's well organized and clean looking. Unfortunately, the small, 2-inch screen on the ROKR E8 only allowed us to view two fields at a time, and sometimes one of those would be cut off, so clearly screen real estate isn't being well managed. Conference calling required more menu digging than we would have liked, but then so did every other feature. The speaker was loud, but not loud enough for this music-focused phone. We prefer the abusive volume we saw on the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phone.
Messaging - Good
The Motorola ROKR E8 has some good messaging options, though we did have difficulty setting up our accounts. SMS and MMS messaging worked just fine, and we liked the way the phone can accept music files as message attachments. Instant messaging was also available for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ, which is a rarity these days. The messaging clients were all fairly standard, nothing surprising. We had trouble setting up the phone's e-mail client to check our Gmail account, but poor reception could be to blame. The phone asked us for our e-mail address and password, and seemed to be setting up our account. Unfortunately, new mail sent to our Gmail address never showed up on the phone, and it didn't download any of our existing messages.
Typing on the ROKR E8's keys felt exactly like typing on a normal, though stiff keypad. We had to press hard for every key, which defeats the point of an elegant touch sensitive setup. Still, it wasn't difficult, and we had no trouble with the keypad's sensitivity, once we realized how hard we had to push.
Music - Mediocre
With the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phone (compare), our favorite feature is the dedicated music button that instantly starts or stops the music. On the ROKR E8, to play music you have to dig through menu after menu, or press the dedicated key and wait for the music player to shift into gear, which often took five or six seconds. When it does, you get dedicated keys on the home screen, though these didn't add any functionality beyond the normal 4-key navigation button; they just looked better.
The scroll wheel did not help the music experience on this phone. It was difficult to select the song we wanted, and if our finger lingered at the edge of the crescent, we often found ourselves jumping quickly to the end of our song list. For music transfer, the phone synchronizes with Windows Media Player as an MTP device. We were unhappy with this so-called synchronization because it didn't seem to synchronize. Instead, it would simply add or subtract. When we changed a track name on our desktop, it wouldn't show up on the phone in the next sync, so we usually had to delete the file on the phone and synchronize again to correct. This is precisely why Apple's iTunes is so popular, because it is so effortless.
The phone features some good playback options, including an equalizer and stereo Bluetooth support. Playlist creation would have been improved if scrolling and selecting songs on the phone was easier, but with the problematic scroll wheel it was difficult to put together a long list. The phone tries to redeem itself with a couple nice features. First, it comes with 2GB of onboard storage, which is very nice, and probably as much as we need, though the device also accepts 4GB microSDHC cards. Second, it has a 3.5mm headphone jack, which is a necessity for a music phone.
Web browser - Mediocre
The Web browser on the Motorola ROKR E8 wasn't half bad, but it was hurt by poor reception issues, which made page loading unreliable, coupled with the already-slow networking speeds of T-Mobile's EDGE network. The Motorola Symphony browser had little trouble opening our own homepage in a full-page view, and layout was very good, though some of the images didn't line up perfectly. Unfortunately, in full page mode the scroll wheel is inactive, which made browsing more difficult. In single column view, the scroll works better, but still seemed kind of sluggish.
Camera - Mediocre
The 2-megapixel camera on the Motorola ROKR E8 took images that looked okay, but not great. Colors looked rich and saturated, but almost no details in our shots came through cleanly. For our first sample (click here to view), we photographed a ViewMaster in our light tent under studio lights. The orange was nice and saturated, but the text on the ViewMaster was almost illegible. For our second (click here to view), find this editor engaging in a 'happy snap' self portrait that came out even fuzzier than he appears in real life.
Price and availability
The Motorola ROKR E8 will start selling for $200 ((T-Mobile)) in July 2008.
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