Motorola Motorola Rokr E8

Regardless of which way you use the phone, a two-inch LCD occupies the upper half of the unit. Tiny raised glass dots and haptics feedback (vibrations) help confirm your fingertip touches, and the silvery metal strip acts as a touch-sensitive navigation wheel for scrolling and clicking through menu options using your thumb.

Unfortunately, I found the wheel difficult to control. All too often I overshot or undershot my target as I scrolled through the rather long main menu, or even through a short list of contacts. And the menu structure itself, especially for adjusting settings, wasn't intuitive: I waded through several levels of options before giving up on finding the evaluation unit's phone number. In addition, the glass-covered touch controls required fairly firm touching-with no way to adjust touch sensitivity.

Voice quality on my T-Mobile test unit was fine. We haven't lab-tested the phone's talk-time battery life yet. Check back for test results--and the PCW Rating--for the Rokr E8 once we do.

The phone defeated all my efforts to use the carrier's Web-based contact manager to import my Outlook contacts in order to sync them onto the E8. (The alternative is to spend $35 on Motorola's Phone Tools 5.0, a desktop app that includes contact syncing.)

Though the Rokr E8 provides predictive text entry support, using its touch keypad would be even more annoying than using a mechanical phone keypad to compose a lot of text. And the small screen is not optimal for Web browsing, which in my shipping unit proceeded rather slowly on T-Mobile's EDGE network.

But I did enjoy listening to music on the E8's surprisingly robust built-in speakers, and the standard headphone jack is conveniently located on the top of the unit.

The E8 comes with a capable music-syncing app that's easy to use when you connect the phone to your PC with the included USB cable. The unit has a generous 2GB of on-board memory, and you can add up to 4GB more via microSD media. The unit supports a good variety of music formats (MIDI, MP3, AAC, AAC+, Enhanced AAC+, WMA, WAV, AMR-NB, Real Audio 10 Microsoft music ecosystem).

I also enjoyed using the included Shazam MusicID app to identify songs heard on the radio: Launch the app and hit a Listen button to capture several seconds of the tune and send it to Shazam's servers; moments later you receive not only the name of the song and performer, but the album and cover art. SongID worked flawlessly in my tests with several pop tunes (although classical and some world music stumped it).

T-Mobile sells the Rokr E8 for $150 (with a two-year contract). The phone makes most sense for customers seeking a stylish handset that excels at music, and not much interested messaging or Web applications.

For a video look at the Rokr E8, see "Motorola Rokr Is Great for Music Lovers."