Hands-on with Motorola's ROKR E8

It's been six long months since my first hands-on with the E8 music phone, which is finally available in the U.S. via T-Mobile. My original feelings about the E8 were mixed—I loved the morphing, touch-sensitive keypad, but the pre-production model I tried seemed sluggish and tricky to use. And now? Read on for my impressions.

Appearance-wise, the E8 review unit I've been testing looks exactly as I remembered. Measuring 4.5 by 2.1 by 0.4 inches and weighing in at about 3.8 ounces, the ROKR E8 doesn't feel particularly thin or light for its size, but its black, nearly featureless face will certainly turn heads.

Tap the keypad (or at least, the space where the keys should be) and the E8 lights up, complete with a sharp, two-inch display and a traditional numeric keypad.

Well, traditional-looking, anyway. What makes the E8 special is its MotoShift technology (that's what Moto calls it, at least), which makes the various keys light up with different symbols depending on what you're doing with the phone.

For example, if you're making calls, you get the standard 12-key numeric layout, along with Talk and End buttons, a Back buttons, and soft keys.

Switch to the music player, however, and the key layout morphs before your eyes. The numeric keys disappear, leaving you with play/pause, shuffle, repeat, and skip buttons. Turn the 2MP camera on, and the keypad morphs again, giving you zoom in, zoom out, video recording and picture gallery buttons. Nice.

Another cool feature: Although the keypad is almost completely flat (save for a series of plastic rivets) and free of moving parts, the buttons seem to click when you tap them—and I mean an actual click, not just a vibration. It's an uncanny effect, and all achieved through haptic feedback, I'm told.

Unfortunately, the E8's delights don't extend to its dull, dated interface.

For example, when you hit the "Music" key, all you get is a plain-text list of browsing options (recently played, shuffle songs, all songs, artists, albums, and so on). The playback screen does support album art, which is always a nice touch—overall, however, not very inspiring.

Not helping matters is the touch-enabled, omega-shaped navigational control, which lets you browse long lists of songs; you tap and hold near the top of the curved control for slow scrolling, then slide your finger down the curve to scroll faster and faster. Dubbed FastScroll, it's a handy feature for zooming to the bottom of a long list, but becomes tough to control once you're zeroing in on your selection. Indeed, I often gave up on the omega control (why not just go for a 360-degree wheel?) in favor of the old-style, four-way navigational keypad.

Even worse, the E8's interface still seems pretty sluggish. In my tests, it took up to four seconds for the phone to switch from the main menu to its music player, and another three to four seconds for the camera to start up. Meanwhile, cycling through the main menu icons took about half a second each. Not good.

Back on the plus side: Side-loading tunes to the EDGE-only E8 was easy, thanks to the phone's ability to sync with Windows Media Player (too bad the E8 won't support iTunes, nor did it appear as a removable drive in Mac OS X). Storage isn't a problem; the E8 boasts 2GB of internal flash memory, plus support for another 4GB of microSD memory expansion. The 3.5mm headset jack works with any set of standard earphones, and you can also listen over a stereo Bluetooth headset. There's even an on-board music ID app to help you identify music over the radio.

In terms of the basics, the E8 held its own. My test calls sounded loud and clear, picture quality from the 2MP camera was solid, if not stellar, and you get a full complement of SMS and picture/video messaging features. The phone's IM client supports AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! and Windows Live messaging, and an e-mail client lets you tap into AOL and Yahoo! Web mail, or any POP/IMAP account. No Wi-Fi or GPS, however.

Moto promises more than seven hours of talk time from the E8, and the lab rats at CNET have verified (and even managed to exceed) that figure. 

At $200 with a two-year contract from T-Mobile, the ROKR E8 seems awfully pricey for what you get, even with all the fancy ModeShift technology; if you're intested in snapping one up, consider waiting until the price falls below $100 with service (which it will, eventually).

Related:
Product page [T-Mobile]