The first handsets have landed in the UK and Lordpercy met a shady character in the back bar of a south London pub to get a bit of quality time with the latest in digital technology. It's quite a contrast in a wood panelled pub that has stood on the same spot for over a hundred years to then see the latest in high technology music phones slip out of a jacket. Measuring 108 x 46 x 20.5 mm and weighing 107 grams it's fairly average in size and weight and no winner of the beauty contest either.

Apple claimed it was not looking to produce an iPod phone and we wonder if they will now be forced to do so after leaving Motorola to produce what can only be described as an industrial looking mobile. There is no obvious Apple styling cues at least not in the handset that Motorola have used to house Apples iTunes software. It's not all bad and perhaps we are being a bit harsh but when you hear there is an iTunes phone you sort of expect a real stunning design possibly an ice white phone with sleek lines.

What you do get is a middle of the road phone, A Rokr or rocker phone which is very different from the super slim Razr range, in fact this iTunes equipped model has already seen the light of day as the E398. This Tri band mobile also sports Bluetooth 1.2 connectivity a basic web browser, GPRS and a 0.3 mega pixel camera. Now a 0.3 mega pixel camera is pretty poor compared to the 2.0 mega pixel cameraphones that are commonplace, the only word to describe the Rokr's photographic capabilities is "Pants".

We gave the mobile phone features of the Rokr E1 a test and found that it hangs onto calls well even in difficult signal areas, audio quality is OK if not brilliant but it's Bluetooth connection is excellent and when tested with a HS850 audio quality was very clear both on transmit and receive.

However it's not the mobile phone features that your buy the Rokr iTunes version for, a small button with an audio note on it fires up the iTunes application which has more than a passing resemblance to the iPod interface. The screen gives basic navigation to your stored music but has many of the iTunes / iPod menus removed, it is however simple to navigate to tracks and select them by track name / artist, even accessing play lists.

The big question for us is how does it sound? We needn't have been concerned as the Rokr E1 is comparable with the iPod shuffle in audio quality, using standard ear buds the audio was clean, crisp if not overly bass rich, switching to a pair of Shure E2c's the bass was there and sounding very convincing. We tried a track on our 4G iPod and then the same track on the Rokr and found there to be few audible differences.

Filling up the E1 is not as easy as it should be, with iTunes hastily fired up on Lordpercy's laptop we were able to connect to the phone and to use manual and also auto fill to push tracks over, this bit was easy. Sadly we managed to drink another pint before we'd moved 50 tracks, officially Motorola state that it takes 30 seconds to move 4mb, this USB 1.0 connection is frankly very poor and not good when you only have a 100 track storage space. Don't go getting clever ideas about using Bluetooth to move tracks either, moto haven't enabled data transfer, also they have blocked the audio from being routed to a Bluetooth headset or other wire free audio device.

If it takes so long to fill up we set about seeing if you could increase storage, the transflash card is actually a mini SD card located next to the battery, so change this 512mb version for a bigger one (if available) and you'd have more space? It seems that Motorola have crippled the iTunes application with a 100 track limit, so much so that it isn't even using the whole 512mb available.

Battery life is a thorny issue, Moto claim a 15 hour playback life from the Rokr E1, but with just a little phone use especially Bluetooth this plummets. The chap who brought the unit along had been using it for the last week and found that 2 hours use each day on the tube and average phone use needed a 2 day top up. So 48 hours life not 5 days on standby as claimed, but convergent devices are very difficult to pin down on battery use when you use WiFi and then multimedia capabilities.

Overall the Motorola Rokr E1 iTunes phone is an average phone that is only enlivened by it's iTunes application, but Motorola have done their best to strangle this with limited storage, appalling transfer rates and lack of over the air file transfer. We don't want to be too harsh as this is the first time iTunes has left the safe confines of a PC or Mac, but convergence has to be better than this, especially compared to the Sony Ericsson W800 walkman phone or Nokias new N91.

Perhaps the most telling statement is that Nokia intend to allow it's N91 to run 3rd party music applications, for example iTunes, so what would you choose an old Moto mobile with 512mb and restrictive connectivity or an N91 with 4gb hard drive and iTunes loaded?

The Rokr E1 iTunes phone may have a short life based on the novelty factor but MP3 playback on phones is already more advanced than the first offering from Moto / Apple.

Published - 02/10/2005

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