Product Reviews

As a child, you could barely contain your excitement when you saw presents under the Christmas tree. They were so pregnant with potential, so full of promise. Come Christmas morning, when the paper came off, the reality was usually much more prosaic: the lesson here is that things are rarely as good as you anticipate them to be.

Which brings us to the Motorola ROKR E1. This is the nearest thing to the fabled 'iPhone' - an Apple-developed mobile phone for which so many have been clamouring for so long - that we're likely to see for some time. This is a phone that has been jointly developed by Motorola and Apple, and was launched at an Apple event.

So why is it so ugly? Well, probably because Apple's involvement was limited to developing its version of the iTunes player. This handset is based on an existing design of Motorola's; the only cosmetic difference is that the old E398's grey plastics have been ditched for a slightly pearlescent white. We assume there was a reason why Motorola chose not to pick the wafer-thin RAZR model for the iTunes treatment, but it's beyond us.

Aside from aesthetics, the problem is the interface is a bit of a dog. First, it doesn't look great: the animated icons look like the height of mid-1990s fashion, and the themes look like they weren't so much designed as programmed. We could overlook this, but we're less disposed to turn a blind eye to a tortuous menu structure and an inconsistent system of soft keys and physical buttons. If the only mobile phone you've used has been from Motorola, you'll be right at home, but we recommend borrowing someone's five-year-old Nokia and treating yourself to a vision of good interface design.

Apple did design the iTunes interface, so it must be good, right? Nope. True, it doesn't look bad - the narrow font used is a decent attempt to get lots of horizontal information on a portrait screen - but the phone's processor seems to be too slow to react quickly to key presses. Once you've worked out how to adjust the volume

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(jog the slippery joystick up or down), you have to wait a second or so before the volume changes. Want to rate a track? Press the joystick in three times. Wait. Ah, there's the rating screen now. Move left or right to rate. Wait. Done. It's sticky, sluggish and altogether frustrating, and really makes us appreciate the speed of the iPod and the elegance of its Click Wheel. On a more positive note, because you have access to an alphanumeric keyboard, you can press, say, G to go straight to Glenn Miller.

Sound quality is very good, although the supplied earphones lack punch and make you look like you have miniature judges' gavels sticking out of your ears. There's a headphone jack, but it's not the normal 3.5mm connection. To use your own headphones, you have to carry around the short adaptor and lose the hands-free functionality because there's then no microphone. The built-in stereo speakers are superb for such a small device, but we question how useful they are.

By now, you'll probably know the ROKR limits the number of songs it can store to 100. It stores the music on a truly miniscule 512MB TransFlash card, and even if higher-capacity cards existed (they don't), you'd only be able to store 100 songs on them.

Worse still, copying tracks is a painfully slow process. At around an hour to fill the phone, you won't be changing tracks often or just dropping on a new album on your way out of the door.

The ROKR has an historical significance: it's the first device from a third-party manufacturer to be able to play tracks protected by Apple's FairPlay DRM system. Inexplicably, though, we found that some tracks refused point blank to play - regardless of whether or not they were protected - and try as we might, we couldn't discern a pattern: the phone just plain skipped past some tracks.

In fairness, this is the best integration between iTunes on your Mac and a phone that exists, but it's still far from satisfactory.

As an iPod shuffle substitute, the ROKR is disappointing. And it fails to set the world alight even as a phone. True, it syncs with iCal and Address Book, but a contact with three phone numbers, say, is split into three separate entries, making it inconvenient to scroll to a particular number.

Battery life is excellent, but other gripes - only a VGA-quality camera, inability to use MP3s as ring tones - mean that such good stuff gets overlooked.

The Motorola ROKR E1 is free on many contracts, but we seriously suggest you just say no. Sony Ericsson's W800i doesn't boast the same iTunes integration, but it's a far more flexible phone.