Motorola Rokr E1 review

Mobile phones that can play music files have been around for at least three years, but most phones require a third-party application or have very primitive music and playlist support.

Motorola's E1 is the first handset to come with a pre-installed version of Apple's iTunes software, which can synchronise with iTunes on your PC.

Apart from its white finish, the E1 looks like a standard Motorola phone. The music button under the screen takes you directly to the iTunes application. The keypad's large keys are easy to press, but the joystick is annoyingly unresponsive and often caused us to select the wrong option.

Getting music on to the phone is simple. Once you've installed the latest version of iTunes on your PC you simply plug the E1 in through the USB port or connect using Bluetooth and, after a short pause, iTunes detects the device. You can drag music to the phone's icon one song at a time, create a playlist to copy or even get the software to select tracks randomly until the phone's memory is full.

Copying tracks over Bluetooth is predictably slow, but so is the USB connection. Filling the phone's 512MB memory takes around 20 minutes, which is no good if you want to fill it quickly before going out. Songs are stored on a removable 512MB TransFlash card, but the phone's software limits it to a maximum of 100 songs, presumably to avoid competition with the iPod nano.

The phone's iTunes software looks the same as the software on any iPod, but it's much slower. There is a delay of around a second between pressing a key and the phone responding, which makes browsing tedious. The supplied headphones are of reasonable quality, but still far inferior to those supplied with the Sony Ericsson W800 due to their lack of bass.

The ROKR E1 also suffers by comparison with the W800 when you consider the built-in cameras. The W800's 2-megapixel camera produced the best photos we had seen from a phone, but Motorola's E1 makes do with a VGA sensor. Images are muddy, blocky and nowhere near good enough to print.

Despite all this, the E1 works well as a phone. Call quality is clear and battery life is good enough to last for a couple of days of moderate use. The texting application is also logical and easy to use, if rather prone to lag.

After all the hype surrounding its launch, Motorola's E1 is a colossal anticlimax. Transferring music to the phone is easy, but the audio quality is only average through the standard headphones and the slow iTunes application is frustrating to use and limited to 100 songs. The camera is also very poor, so compared with Sony Ericsson's W800, Motorola's ROKR E1 looks distinctly substandard.

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