Motorola Rokr E1 (AT&T)
With Cingular's Motorola Rokr, the iTunes phone has finally arrived. Get a sneak peek in our First Take.
After months of rumors, speculation, and a whole lot of hype, the Motorola iTunes cell phone has finally made its debut. This morning, Motorola and Apple joined with Cingular to unveil the Motorola Rokr E1 at an event in San Francisco. In short, the Rokr E1 is less an MP3 player with a phone attached and more a phone that happens to have an integrated version of iTunes preinstalled. You can load up to 100 iTunes songs directly on to the mobile phone via a USB cable (the phone will appear as an icon on your computer) and play them using the familiar Apple interface, which displays the album art, the track info, and the artist. The handset itself looks nothing like the streamlined device in pictures that floated around the techie blogs earlier this summer; rather, it sports an attractive if simple candy bar design that's relatively compact (4.3 by 1.8 by 0.8 inches; 3.7 ounces) and is almost identical to the Motorola E398. The primary navigation tool is a five-way joystick below a sizable 262,000-color display with the standard Motorola menu interface for phone functions. The phone costs $249 with a two-year contract and is available on Cingular's Web site starting today.
Upside: It's no surprise that the music player is the Rokr's primary attraction--it's called the Rokr, after all. A dedicated key just below the phone's display activates the player, and music automatically stops when you receive a call. Hang up, and your tunes pick up again from the same point you left off. You can organize your songs by playlist, artist, and album, and the player also comes with a shuffle mode. We had a quick chance to examine the Rokr, and music quality was among the best we've heard for an MP3 phone, either through the polyphonic stereo speakers or the included stereo headset. Motorola claims you'll be able to download 4MB of music in 30 seconds, but keep in mind that actual download times may vary. Other than MP3s, the Rokr also plays MIDI, AAC, and WAV files, and it comes with an airplane mode for listening to your tunes in flight with the phone functionality off.
Nonmusic features include a VGA camera with a flash and 4X zoom; MPEG-4 video capability for clips up to 30 seconds; Bluetooth; photo caller ID; e-mail support for POP3, IMAP4, and SMTP; a speakerphone with a dedicated key; text and multimedia messaging; instant messaging; basic PIM functions; syncing for your calendar and contacts; Java (J2ME) support; a vibrate mode; and a WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser. In terms of battery life, Motorola promises a respectable 9 hours of talk time, nine days of standby time, and up to 15 hours for music playback only.
Downside: To begin with, you'll be able to download iTunes music only via a USB cable. There's no way to transfer music wirelessly; according to Motorola, the Rokr's Bluetooth feature works only with voice calls. We're also puzzled by the 100-song limit for the iTunes player. For a device that's all about music, we would have liked to see at least 1GB. What's worse is that songs are stored only in the included TransFlash memory card. While TransFlash cards are currently limited to 512MB anyway, Apple indicated this version of the Rokr will keep its 100-song limit even if bigger cards come out. Integrated memory for photos and other applications is also somewhat small at a paltry 5MB.
Although Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the Rokr would be a quad-band world phone, Cingular is listing the handset as triband (GSM 850/1800/1900) only, and data speeds are limited to GPRS rather than EDGE. As for the camera, we normally would prefer to see a megapixel camera in such a high-end phone, but with music taking the main stage, we'll give it a pass in this case.
Outlook: We're definitely excited to see this phone, mostly because we were so tired of waiting for it. That said, the Rokr's compatibility with user-friendly iTunes (the world's most popular music download service) gives it a solid boost over any other MP3 phone, including the Sony Ericsson W800i. We're also pleased to see that Cingular will not be slapping customers with any additional charges for transferring music to your mobile. Once you pay for music on iTunes, you can listen away. But as good as the music may sound, we still demand solid call quality. We'll find out in our full review--check back soon for that.