Motorola ROKR

Motorola's ROKR E1 phone is actually an older phone, the E398, with a new silver case and iTunes on board. It comes with a wired headset and an adapter so you can use standard music-player headphones.

When it's not in iTunes mode, the ROKR works just like most other Motorola phones. Only the little musical-note key gives away its secret.

The iTunes interface on the ROKR should look familiar to anyone who owns an iPod. Rather than using a click wheel, you navigate with the joystick.

The iTunes "now playing" screen on the ROKR looks just like the iPod interface, including album art when it's available.

Now here's something weird: the ROKR actually has a second MP3 player on the Motorola side of the system. If you send an MP3 over using Bluetooth, it ends up in this player, not in iTunes.

The ROKR has the standard Motorola menu system, but with an iTunes icon in the upper right corner.

The ROKR has a pretty good VGA camera with a tiny LED flash/light.

On the back of the ROKR, you can see the camera, the light and a self- portrait mirror.

It's extremely difficult to get to the ROKR's memory card. First you have to take out the battery, then flip open a very awkward little metal door. The phone comes with a 512 MB card, the largest available right now.

The volume buttons are on the left side of the Motorola ROKR. The iTunes system only has seven volume steps, which we found disappointing.

On the right side of the ROKR, you see one of the powerful stereo speakers and the camera button. The phone makes quite a little boom box.

The headphone jack is on the top of the ROKR. It's a small, cell- phone-style jack, so you need to use an adapter if you want to use music-player headphones.

The ROKR's power/USB port is on the bottom. The phone comes with a USB cable, but it only transfers music at slow USB 1.1 speeds.

The ROKR looks just like an iPod Shuffle in iTunes on a PC. But perplexingly, the ROKR is capped to 100 songs. Try to add more than 100, and you'll get an error message.

The ROKR has the same Autofill option as the iPod Shuffle does. But watch out! Filling the whole ROKR takes an hour because of the phone's slow transfer speed.

With the help of a little Scotch tape, we built an iTunes phone with eight times the capacity of the ROKR, better sound quality and a click wheel.

We attached an iPod Nano to a RAZR and found that together, they're almost exactly the same width as a ROKR. And they're black.