Motorola Rokr E8 review

[hari]

Five months after it nabbed two awards at CES, the Motorola Rokr E8 has landed.

It will go on sale July 7 for T-Mobile ($199 with service) but we got our hands on a review model this week to give it a full shake-down. It's always exciting a new phone arrives in the CNET labs, particularly when it's a model that was born with lots of fanfare.

After a couple days of poking and prodding, we can report that the Rokr E8 hits some high marks.

Its music player performs well and its feature set should satisfy multimedia fans.

It also offers decent call quality, a brilliant display and a sleek profile. Of course, it was the Rokr E8's "morphing" keypad that caught our attention originally, and that feature largely lives up to our expectations.

We like how the backlighting changes as you move between features and how the keypad takes on the ergonomics of both a cell phone and a music player. Yet, there were a few things about the E8 that left us disappointed.

The Rokr's navigation controls involve a steep learning curve and the handset lacks 3G, corporate e-mail support and wireless music downloads. We also found that some menus were a bit sluggish and that the wireless Web browser wasn't very intuitive.

But if you're looking for a full-featured and well-performing music phone, the Rokr E8 is a solid choice.