Motorola ROKR E8

Features and Performance
The E8 is a quadband GPRS/EDGE device with no 3G or Wi-Fi. The USP of the phone, it seems to me, happens to be the music player. As I mentioned earlier, the inclusion of a 3.5-mm jack is a good move, and the fact that you can purchase portable stereo speakers is another plus. But more on that later.

For easy access the Modeshift button comes in handy. But the same can’t be said about the Fastscroll wheel. Unlike the iPod wheel navigation system, this one is quite non-responsive. Ideally, you would like the touch to register as soon as you lay your finger on it. This is not the case! It takes a second to register touches, which means you can’t be really fast with the scroll.

The buttons deploy haptics technology, which indicates every keypress with a tiny vibration. The problem with the keypad is that it doesn’t leave you with a feeling of having registered a click satisfactorily. Initially, I thought it’s just me. But I double-checked using two different pieces, with a whole lot of people from the office, and the verdict stays.

You have give it to Motorola for thinking of a simple technology called Morphing, which lights up only those keys that need to be used while using the music player, camera etc. No more need to squint at the icons on the buttons.

Messaging will take getting used to. But the dictionary system the phone uses is simply fantastic. It learns fast and does the job well, but Nokians are advised to unlearn everything they know. What isn’t fun is that the sluggish performance seeps into messaging as well.

The screen proved most disappointing. The two-inch QVGA TFT affair with a resolution of 240 x 320 and 262K colors fails to impress. Perhaps Fastscroll is to blame for the tiny screen.