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We received our Motorola ROKR E1—also known as "the iPod phone"—a bit late, as it had already been destroyed by many other sites and publications. The RORK wasn't reviewed, it was pilloried.

By now, with the negative reviews mostly over, the analysis stories are starting to appear, trying to understand how a phone this misguided came to be in the first place.

The ROKR's story is a sad one.

Perhaps never before have so many techie hopes been crushed so badly. There had been widespread rumors of an iPod phone for many, many months before the announcement. Since the ROKR wasn't developed solely by Apple, word leaked out early that it was being made and with that people's imagination took off. A phone with the style and features of an iPod-gadget lovers drooled just thinking about it.

But the ROKR doesn't have iPod style.

In fact, it's a black eye to the iPod brand. Buyers would have been happy with something akin to the RAZR, Motorola's hip, stylish, and successful flip phone, but the ROKR looks like any other candy bar-style phone. It looses points right off the bat, simply for being kind of plain looking. It's actually a variation on the Motorola E398, which was never released in this country. That adds insult to injury for iPod fans, since the product team didn't even bother coming up with an original design.

Basic Specs
The phone measures 4.3 x 1.8 by .8 inches and fits in the hand nicely. If it were anything but the first iPod phone, it would have found better press.

It features a bright 176 x 220 pixel screen and an easy button layout. The back holds a VGA camera, which is capable of taking 640 by 480 pixel photos. That's also pretty skimpy. The first iPod phone should have had a 2 megapixel camera.

iPod Like?
Press the button on front marked with the iTunes note symbol to launch iTunes. iPod users will recognize the familiar iPod interface. You move around with the tiny thumbstick rather than the iPod's familiar touchwheel. We'd have thought the developers would have included the popular touchwheel. How did they leave that out?

Much of what's wrong with the ROKR is what's wrong with cell phones in general. There are several limits built into it for no other reason but to get users to spend more money on phone services. Rather than making the phone a pleasure, that makes it a nuisance, something ready to pick your pocket at every turn.

For starters, the phone has a limit on the number of songs it can hold. While the phone's 512 MB of TransFlash storage could hold more than 100 songs, that's the artificial cap put in place. There's no way to add extra memory to store more songs. That insures that the ROKR will never take the place of your iPod, and won't cannibalize iPod sales.

You also can't use your iTunes songs for your ringtone, a stupid and irritating built-in barrier. If you did that, you wouldn't buy Cingular's downloadable ringtones for $2.50 each, and that would be a problem.

Slow Connections
Some issues with the ROKR seem just plain careless. You connect it to your computer with a USB 1.1 cable, not a much faster USB 2.0 type. Motorola seems to want to bury this fact on its Web site, and only notes that song transfers take about 30 seconds for a 4 MB file. Gosh, only 30 seconds?

Of course, that means it takes about 50 minutes to transfer all your 100 songs, instead of under two minutes, which is what it would take with a USB 2.0 connection. Fifty minutes is a long time to wait when you want to freshen up the songs on your phone.

iTunes
The ROKR connects easily to iTunes 5.0 (or higher) loaded onto a Windows or Mac computer, and you can use the autofill feature to get a random selection of songs, or manually drag-and-drop your favorites. Like other iPods, it can connect to only one computer. If you connect to a second to load more songs, you'll need to erase the songs that were already on the phone.

That's the only way to put new songs on your ROKR, since it also can't connect to the iTunes Music Store. Hard to believe, but it's true. You can go online with a data plan, but there's no mechanism to connect to the iTunes Music Store and purchase that song that won't stop going through your head.

Audio
At least the ROKR sounds pretty good. You can play your music through its tiny speakers for a sound that isn't hi-fi stereo, but is richer than we would have expected for a cell phone. The ROKR comes with a pair of while earphones that resemble the trademark iPod earbuds, but are a bit larger and have a microphone built into the cord.

They also produce a good, rich sound. We found it a pleasure to only have to carry one gadget with the ROKR, rather than two, and were impressed with how easy it is to switch between listening to music and making a call.

Additional Features
The ROKR gets a decent 260-560 minutes of talk time and a big 160-230 hours when in standby. It supports e-mail and MMS messaging (although that doesn't work with iTunes), Bluetooth (except for iTunes song loading), instant messaging, and WAP browsing. But browsing isn't as fast as it should be, as the phone uses GPRS for data instead of EDGE. The phone sells for $249 with a two-year Cingular contract.

Coming with so many intentional limitations, the ROKR is a cynical product and not one that we'd endorse. No one else is giving it a good write-up either, which is great to see. Perhaps that will convince the cell phone makers to change their ways. Even more than a stylish iPod phone, we'd like to see a cell phone that doesn't charge extra for features that should be standard.

And there are already rumors of a new, better iPod phone in the works. We can only hope Apple designs this one.