Motorola ROKR E8

Another sexy looker from Motorola with a glossy facia built out of a single piece of transparent fibre. In fact with the screen and keypad lighting switched off the ROKR E8 looks like something that just walked off a Milan catwalk. The rear is not so exotic and is metal with a rubberised surface coating. The number keys have a very tiny raised dimple to indicate that your finger is indeed on top of a key and this is the only way to discern between keys. The key layout is spaced and well done, but key feedback is not at all positive and key travel is minimal — something Motorola does a lot on their phones. The black shiny surface has a chrome slash in the form of the joypad and even this fits flush in the phone such that the entire top is on one plane. The menu buttons are well laid out as are the call buttons. Backlighting is slightly excessive, although it tends to get dim in daylight. The phone itself is wide but not thick. Needless to say build quality is really good thanks to the metal rear. We’d like the screen to have been larger, but two inches is all we got.

Although the ROKR E8 has mediocre in-call quality, it’s a good music player. The bundled earphones are also good and the 3.5-mm jack is a plus. The measly support for audio and video formats is a minus though.

At Rs. 13,999 the ROKR E8 is a super swanky looking phone that offers a fair amount of features. It’s a really neat looking phone that Motorola fans will really appreciate and others will admire. But for the features and performance we feel it’s overpriced. The Abhishek Bachan advertisement for the ROKR series not withstanding, we recommend that you to wait for price drops or look elsewhere for your groove.