Motorola ROKR E8 First Impression Cell Phone Review - Imaging & Software
Imaging
Still and video capture share an identical interface. Opening up the camera application (which has a hardware shortcut) will cause the keypad to morph into four different buttons. The top two are digital zoom buttons. The bottom left one skips to the photo album, and the bottom right toggles between still and video capture. The Rokr E8 sports a two-Megapixel fixed-focus camera with 144 x 176 video capture. We haven't been particularly impressed by the two-Megapixel cameras we've seen from Motorola on the Razr2 lineup so we don't expect much here.
Making/Receiving Calls
It's definitely easy to make a call with the ROKR E8. The touch buttons don't require much pressure. Though it took a while for the numbers to option to the mix: frequency of dials. Now your friends can steal your phone and find out which one of them you like the most. The phone also keeps timers for both calls and data transfers.
Messaging
SMS and MMS message share an inbox, but are separated when its time to actually make a message. The messaging interface seems to be very basic, and the options list only consisted of sending options. There is no shortcut button to get to SMS messages, but there wasn't any extraneous menu navigation necessary: just enter the main menu, browse to the Messaging application, then click on create new. The phone has a web-based email client, which means you'll need a network connection to read your email. A built-in email client would download your email and let you read them at any time.
Organizer
The ROKR E8 follows in the recent trend of tabbed fields. Creating a new contact or calendar entry will bring up the usual list of fields, only with the option to press left and right to scroll through some other options, such as invitees (for appointments), notes, and such. They're more of an organizational tool than added functionality, but it's rare for a non-business device to allow invitees. The fields are really good for a media handset, allowing functionality just shy of true professional devices. The phone also has a tasks application, but it's very basic -- it doesn't even have tabs! The phone does feature basic text notes and a somewhat complicated voice notes application.
Multimedia
Playing back music on the ROKR E8 will allow the phone to show off it's morphing keypad. Here, the keypad will show skip options, play/pause, shuffle, and repeat. The music software seems to be better than average, but isn't anything mind-blowing. The phone can play MP3, all sorts of AAC files, WMA, WAV, and Real Audio. Video playback has a very, very basic interface. There's an auto-hiding pop-up of the d-pad functionality (play/pause, forward/previous skip) and a progress bar.
Software
The ROKR E8 has a proprietary operating system that seems very generic except for its above-average aesthetic appeal. The phone also seemed to be fairly slow to respond, but again, this isn't necessarily the same software the finished model; when we review the phone in earnest, we'll be sure to keep an eye out for any lag. We're hoping they'll add some games too, since there weren't any on the floor model. There was a calculator and a basic alarm present, however.
There was also a file manager included that allows you to easily manipulate multiple files.
