Motorola Rokr E8 Music Phone

The Rokr E8 excels at music playback, but usability issues plague it in other areas.

The Motorola Rokr E8 looks vaguely like an iPod: glassy, slim, and dark, except for a thin circular metal strip in its middle. The resemblance is probably not coincidental, given that the device is a cell phone intended for music lovers. The 0.4-inch-thick candy bar phone boasts good looks--and isn't half-bad as an MP3 player--but its usability shortcomings in other areas disappoint.

The E8's sexiest attribute is its touch-sensitive surface's ability to change interfaces depending on what you use it for. When you power it on by sliding a silvery hardware button on its right edge, a virtual phone keypad lights up below the metal circle; when you switch to music player mode (by pressing the musical notes above the green dial control), a few simple MP3 controls replace the virtual keypad.

Regardless of which way you use the phone, a two-inch LCD occupies the upper half of the unit. Tiny raised glass dots and haptics feedback (vibrations) help confirm your fingertip touches, and the silvery metal strip acts as a touch-sensitive navigation wheel for scrolling and clicking through menu options using your thumb.

Unfortunately, I found the wheel difficult to control. All too often I overshot or undershot my target as I scrolled through the rather long main menu, or even through a short list of contacts. And the menu structure itself, especially for adjusting settings, wasn't intuitive: I waded through several levels of options before giving up on finding the evaluation unit's phone number. In addition, the glass-covered touch controls required fairly firm touching-with no way to adjust touch sensitivity.

Voice quality on my T-Mobile test unit was fine. We haven't lab-tested the phone's talk-time battery life yet. Check back for test results--and the PCW Rating--for the Rokr E8 once we do.

The phone defeated all my efforts to use the carrier's Web-based contact manager to import my Outlook contacts in order to sync them onto the E8. (The alternative is to spend $35 on Motorola's Phone Tools 5.0, a desktop app that includes contact syncing.)

Though the Rokr E8 provides predictive text entry support, using its touch keypad would be even more annoying than using a mechanical phone keypad to compose a lot of text. And the small screen is not optimal for Web browsing, which in my shipping unit proceeded rather slowly on T-Mobile's EDGE network.

T-Mobile sells the Rokr E8 for $150 (with a two-year contract). The phone makes most sense for customers seeking a stylish handset that excels at music, and not much interested messaging or Web applications.