Motorola ROKR E8 for T-Mobile Review
Priced at $ 199.99 with a two-year T-Mobile contract, music-playing Motorola ROKR E8 lacks some bells and whistles of its competitors in the same price (including iPhone 3G). But thanks to a handful of unique features, including an innovation, a tactile keyboard, this cell phone is hard to resist.
Dressed all in black, this candy-style phone has no keyboard but is aligned with a series of 22 regularly spaced bumps covering the lower half of the phone. These bumps are dynamic keyboard E8, which uses haptic technology to digitally transform depending on how the phone is used. When used for making calls, for example, light bumps to form a conventional keypad. Whether you hit each key, the surface of the phone vibrates gently deceive you into thinking you’re pushing a real button. Touch Button dedicated music phone, and suddenly the keypad disappears, leaving you with nine dedicated buttons for playing tunes.
Press the phone’s camera and the keyboard is transformed again, this time in four tactile buttons to take pictures and video via the 2-megapixel lens. This feature, which Motorola calls ModeShift technology makes the phone very intuitive to use because it eliminates the guessing game for most users should play while browsing through the features of a new phone.
But another important control is not so useful. Sitting in the center of the dial phone FastScroll, a half-circle, designed to work like the iPod wheel to Apple, you can quickly browse menus, contacts, and songs. Unfortunately, we found the wheel to be too sensitive. Even when it scrolls smoothly, the wheel quickly jumped through the files we wanted to highlight, making navigation through long lists tedious. Fortunately, the phone’s volume rocker, which is located on the left side of the device can also be used for navigation.
As a music player, the E8 does what previous ROKR phones were supposed to do-listen to music on a nice phone. You can transfer songs to the phone via a USB cable and Windows Media Player 11 or by means of loading onto a MicroSD card and insert it into the slot. (E8 also supports Macs, but it uses the less elegant drag-and drop method by forcing the phone as a removable disk.) The phone supports MP3, AAC, WMA and WAV.
Once a song is played, the phone displays the album cover, and listeners can adjust the sound settings via the built-in equalizer, although for general purposes, the default sound quality should satisfy most . A special flight mode allows you to listen to music when cell phone use is not authorized or is not available, and with a 3.5 mm headphone jack, you can pair the headset with your E8 preferred. As we have said, browsing through music with the scroll wheel can be tedious, but otherwise, the phone could easily replace your MP3 player, if you have a music collection smaller than 6 GB (the amount maximum memory that this phone can support).
E8 Other features include a 2-inch screen QVGA display, stereo Bluetooth, 2 GB of internal memory (more memory expandable via microSD), FM tuner and a full HTML browser. Do not expect to get a lot of surfing is intense, however, the browser uses the network T-Mobile Edge, which was downright sluggish in our tests. It took 2 minutes to load Google, for example, the E8 and stalled indefinitely when attempting to reach our own homepage. Fortunately, call quality net phone and the battery life stellar, which is rated at 7.5 hours talk time, the balance of its few flaws. In our tests, the battery of the E8 lasted an hour of impressive 8.5, with a mixture of voice communication, the moderate use of the Internet, and the occasional snapshot.
We have combined our E8 with the $ 119 Motorola EQ5, a system of portable speaker which is slightly larger than the E8 itself. Despite its small size, the speaker system is remarkably strong, but it lacks low enough to fill a room. Nevertheless, he completed the E8 very well and can even be used as a speakerphone when you hear no music.
Pros
Slim, sturdy design; intuitive controls; responsive touchpad/keypad
Cons
Scroll wheel overly sensitive; camera lacks a flash; slow Web browsing on EDGE network
Conclusion
Despite its high price tag and disappointing Web browser, this phone’s dynamic keyboard, music-playing features, and intuitive interface make it worth the investment.
Leave a Reply