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Appearance
This is not a simple bar type phone, but the device attracting glances. No man stayed indifferent towards this model, each one wanted to hold and turn it in his hands, to take a look all over it, to press the keys and then to express his fie! In the majority of cases people liked this device due to its unusual geometry and small thickness.
 

100 g of weight mostly suited too.
Of course no one could miss mini-jack on the upper end of the phone and no one knew why it was so expressive.



On the right end of the phone we can see a paired power/hold key and micro USB jack.





The left end of the phone is inhabited with a volume control wheel which is at the same time responsible for profile choosing and a camera activation key.
The back cover is made of metal and covered with rough plastic.



Lower, on the back side there is a slit of polyphonic loudspeaker as many Motorola models have got. We almost forgot to mention a 2 megapixel camera, it is hiding near the “music” jack.



Optics is sunk into the phone body that is why you can hardly scratch lens.

Keyboard, display and menu
This is where this model shows its singularity for all 100%. The matter is that when this device is in standby mode you will not see any indications on the keys; they are appearing depending on the context. I mean that when you are in the mode of typing the number you see letter-digital indications and when camera or player are launched you can see icons on the keys.





Such technology is not a new for the majority of users but one cannot deny that it is not convenient, though tastes differ. Keys are not of touch type, the response is short and it feels pleasant to press them.



There is a very cute sound effect for pressing the keys – the sound of springs. It perfectly fits here; it even feels that this sound appears when you are pressing exactly the keyboard. Such a sound illusion. Unusual control does not add any special discomfort, you can easily get accustomed to that for 1-2 hours, but there is another control element which causes greater misunderstanding, it is a touch circle (to be more exact – semicircle) or a so called Omega Wheel. There is a 4 position key inside of it which doubles the work of miracle wheel.



With help of this touch key you can wander around menu, wind track (by the way, it winds tracks very quickly and this is what causes discomfort), choose tracks, leaf through the pictures in album and etc.



Frankly speaking no one is anymore surprised with touch control in phones and to be more explicit it is more inconvenient than really useful. And as for E8 you also prefer to use a 4 position key than this technical advantage. Display does not seem to be big which is explained by its horizontal orientation, I guess this is a sufficient display for this model. Matrix is bright, it greatly (I mean naturally) reproduces the colors, grain is very tiny, contrast is high. It is pleasant to view the pictures on the screen as well as different reels, wallpapers, screen savers and other pieces of multi media art. The screen is working good as a viewfinder, just the picture is getting much bleached under the straight sun beams and it needs to cover it with your hand.
You can see the way the menu looks like on the pictures. Id est there are icons in main menu and lower – there are lists.






It did not change its appearance in our non-commercial sample; I mean there was no more than one preinstalled theme. Control system is of medium comfort, there were no any special difficulties, although it is still not convenient to turn on/off Bluetooth.






Music
Due to the fact that ROKR E8 is a music device so it is expected that it should have a decent player. And it is really so. Thankfully to the standards 3,5 mm jack you can use any earphones you want, that is why we can get rid of different adapters which are necessary for some phones, for example for Sony Ericsson models. Plus to that E8 has 2 Gb of embedded memory and there is a microSD card for 1 Gb supplied with commercial samples.
The quality of sound is high and it is comparable with the sound of decent Korean-Taiwan player. You can listen to any music you want with good earphones, starting with pop music and going to Rolling Stones or even something cooler. Output power is enough for non-professional Koss “ears”. E8 easily copes with “inlay” earphones and other kinds of “light artillery”. There are 11 preinstalled equalizers, of course they change the sound image, but it is often that they simply spoil it.




It is a pity that you cannot adjust equalizer yourself and to create your own contemplates. There is also a function of bass amplification, 3D stereo (7 ranges of settings), random mode, auto repeat and etc.




Among drawbacks I can mention that you the chosen equalizer is not displayed while the music is playing.




As for the rest – this is a quite decent player which also supports background play mode. Frankly speaking ROKR E8 can become a real alternative of a common MP3 player, because when the player is turned on (even in background mode) keyboard shows player indication (pause, play, shift tracks and etc), but to type a number you need to click the icon “make call” and to type number in special field and then simply to press “the green phone”.

Radio is like radio. The sensitivity is average, it works twice slower than in Samsung F400, you can store up to 27 stations in memory and there are no problems to direct sound to the speakerphone.






As well as player radio is able working in background mode.
SongID application based on Java is busy with guessing music which sounds on the radio or which is recorded via phone microphone.






The program itself was working in our test sample, but it could not guess anything, I guess because the database server is not working.

Camera
Although until nowadays there were no one Motorola with really good camera we cannot wait for revelation from E8 too. Maximum resolution of this camera is 2 Mp and it gives good results in good lights. When the weather is dull or the pictures are taken indoors the result disappoints us with low sharpness and color noises. The camera settings are standard, there is nothing interesting or new about it.






Storing a picture into the memory takes about one second and we did not notice any hangings.

The test pictures can be seen lower and archive can be downloaded here.
 








Instead of resume
We had a rather working pre-release sample and so we can say that Motorola managed to create a good MP3 player with camera and 2 Gb of memory, but fashionable design and innovative control system, pardon moi, did not hitch up us. For example control system causes more discomfort than pleasure of navigation. This device makes you get accustomed to it for a while, to be attentive, to research the menu peculiarities and it irritates. Frankly speaking low quality of camera embarrasses too. It seems like it is installed into E8 just as a fact that there is a camera.