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Monday, January 9, 2006
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Motorola’s first try at rocking the masses with its iTunes phone pretty much failed. Fortunately, they listened to the public and tried again and I can say in this case, second time is the charm.
The RORK E2 focuses on music and almost makes you forget that you have a phone in there. With a dedicated 3.5mm stereo jack, you can use your kick butt Shure E3 ear buds or Sennheiser over-the-ear headset…or the supplied Motorola ear buds. No adapter needed. The side of the player, er, phone has dedicated buttons for play/pause, forward, reverse and hold. The SD card slot is hot swappable, so you can change out as many as you want as often as you want without having to turn off the player, er, phone. With SanDisk’s 2GB SD card, you’ll be able to slap in 500 songs onto your ROKR without any problem. Transfering that large mass of music will be quick with the USB 2.0 connector. And just to keep the music thing going, it also comes with an FM radio with 30 presets. Nice.
Back to the phone aspect, it as a 1.3 mega pixel camera with “flash” (when did an LED light become a flash?), video capture and playback at 15fps, all on a 2 inch display. The irony is the pixels measure 240 x 320…that of a standard Pocket PC phone…that is lacking on the Motorola’s other CES release, the Q. MMS and Bluetooth are both here (but you can be sure Verizon will kill the later), too. A built-in PIM with Picture Caller ID is also included and Motorola has even thrown in another trendy named item, SCREEN3, which gives you, “zero-click access to news, sports, entertainment, and other premium content.” To round it all up, it has the Opera Browser installed on it. Nice.
I got an oppurtunity to play with the RORK E2 and was very surprised by it. The music sounded incredible — dare I say better then my iPod? — and the screen is gorgeous. The phone layout is not basic for a candy bar type phone, but it’s not as stunning as the RAZR’s, either. Now the kicker, it won’t play iTunes Music Store files. Nope, AAC, yes, protected AAC, no. I was told MP3 was supported by the Motorola rep but he did not say if WMA was supported. I suspect it is, just not the DRM version.
I think Moto did a good job on the second time around on this rockin’ phone.
