MOTOROKR E6 to Rock India in '07

At ITU Telecom 2006 in Hong Kong, Motorola has just announced that the upgrade to the iTunes phone — the ROKR E6 — is expected to be available in India by Q2 2007.

The ROKR E6 is a dual-band GSM (900/1800) and GPRS phone with a 2.4-inch, 256k-color QVGA (240x320) touch-screen and a stylus interface, instead of the standard numeric keypad in the candy bar form factor of the earlier ROKR.

The phone runs Linux and dumps iTunes, favoring RealPlayer, and can play back MP3, WMA, MPEG-4, AAC, RealAudio, WAV, video and photos. Finally, Motorola has added an FM radio in the phone, so the Indian audience won't be left complaining! Also, the ROKR has a convenient 3.5mm stereo jack so you can use your own headphones without being restricted to the ones provided with the handset. If wires don't rock your boat, there's always Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP stereo support for wireless headset.

There's also a 2-megapixel digital camera with business-card and barcode recognition, a Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint document and PDF viewer. There is fast USB 2.0 connectivity for transferring music.

The device has only 8mb of phone memory, but takes in SD memory cards going up to 2GB. The choice of SD memory cards is both surprising, because Motorola has been mostly going with the smaller microSD/TransFlash lately. Fortunately, existing users of other Motorola (or Samsung) phones with microSD cards will be able to use their cards using an SD adapter in the new ROKR E6.

There is no launch date for the phone yet, and neither is there a price, but judging by the price of the MOTOMING A1200, the ROKR E6 won't cost you any limbs.