Moto's New ROKR Gets the Touch

The new music phone features a flat, touch-sensitive keypad that "morphs" depending on whether you're making calls or listening to tunes. Also: Moto's updated "kick-slide" camera/video phone.

I got the chance to test-drive the ROKR E8 last night during a flashy Motorola press event at CES, and I'll say this for the new music phone: it's different. The thin, jet-black candy bar has a decent-sized screen, but instead of a standard keyboard, there's a long, flat pane of glass, punctuated by a series of tiny, symmetrically spaced indentations. Touch the phone and the keypad springs to life; not only do the standard numeric keys appear, but the keys themselves seem to click when you press them, thanks to haptic feedback. Want to play some tunes? Press the music key and the keypad layout morphs into controls for playback and navigation. Click the camera button, and voila: you get dedicated camera controls.

It's a clever idea (along with the three-quarters touch navigation wheel, which slows or speeds your scrolling as you move your thumb to the left or the right), but in practice, the E8 was tricky to use. The Linux/Java-powered phone seemed a bit sluggish, sometimes taking seconds to respond to keystrokes, and the morphing controls weren't quite as intuitive as I'd hoped—I needed some coaching from a nearby Moto rep to navigate from one screen to another. Is it simply a matter of practice makes perfect? Perhaps.

Otherwise, the quad-band GSM ROKR E8 comes with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, 2GB of on-board memory and microSD memory expansion (up to 4GB), an FM radio, stereo Bluetooth, and a 2-megapixel camera. Data is restricted to EDGE, however—no 3G and no Wi-Fi. At least you get a micro USB 2.0 port for sideloading your tunes.

Next up: the Moto Z10, an update to the snazzy RIZR Z8 that I first saw back in April at CTIA. The Z10 is one of Moto's "kickslide" phones: that is, it's a slider phone that slides up and curves to fit the contour of your face. This HSDPA-ready model looks pretty enticing for amateur videographers; it shoots QVGA-quality video at 30 frames per second, and it includes a suite of editing tools that let you splice together your clips, add transitions, lay in a soundtrack, and even add titles. Also nice: you can upload your movies directly to YouTube and other Web-based video-sharing sites. The 3.2-megapixel still camera comes with auto-focus and a burst mode that snaps about three pictures a second, and you can upload snapshots to the Web manually or automatically.

Look for both phones to hit worldwide markets in the coming weeks; no word on U.S. availability or pricing, unfortunately.