Motorola E790 (iTunes phone) Rumours
Available
now 8th May 2005
Note: The E790 has been confirmed
as the Motorola
ROKR.
Motorola's iTunes phone has been rumoured
now for several months, and the official announcement
has been pushed back for so far undisclosed reasons.
However, Motorola are fairly notorious for leaking out
information before the official product launch and there
now appears to be enough intelligence to put together
a picture.
The
iTunes phone appears to be the Motorola E790, a handset
based on the same hardware platform as the E398
and C698p
devices. This makes the E790 a tri-band GSM phone with
Bluetooth, a 176x220 pixel display, VGA resolution camera
and microSD/TransFlash removable memory, probably up
to a maximum of 1Gb storage.
It's possible that Motorola will want
to fit a better camera than the VGA resolution device,
and perhaps do further cosmetic work on the casing to
make the handset more "iPod-like", but at
present the E790 just seems to be a warmed over existing
handset.
Add to that an email client, web browser,
Java support and the usual features, plus the E398's
stereo speakers and you get a handset that's a capable
music phone, but really nothing special.
In fact, from the specifications and
details we've seen so far, the Motorola E790 looks to
be disappointing. Sure, the white colour scheme looks
pretty cool but then so does the Sony
Ericsson T630, and the device lacks the high resolution
screen of the Sony
Ericsson W800 too. What appears to have happened
is that the E398's software has been rewritten to tie
in with the Apple iTunes back end, and other than that
everything else appears to be the same.
But by far the biggest disappointment
is the apparent lack of 3G. Both Nokia and Samsung understand
that a true music phone needs 3G speeds to make it viable,
with the powerful but fairly ugly Nokia
N91 and Samsung
i300 handsets. GSM speeds just aren't sufficient
for downloading high quality audio tracks.
How certain are we of this rumour? Well,
we are 90% certain that the E790 is the correct designation
for the iTunes phone and that it has a screen resolution
of 176x220 pixels, and 75% certain that the E790 is
based directly on the E398 platform. However, it could
well be that the E790 will never be released given past
experience with Motorola handsets, and perhaps Motorola
will replace it with something more capable.. watch
this space!
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Motorola
E790 Provisional Specifications
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Available:
|
Soon
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Network:
|
Tri-band
GSM
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Data:
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GPRS
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Screen:
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176x220
pixels, 65,000 colours
|
Camera:
|
640x480
pixels (0.3 megapixels)
|
Size:
|
Standard
candy bar 108x46x21mm
/ 110 grams approx
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Bluetooth:
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Yes
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Infra-red:
|
No
|
Polyphonic:
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Yes
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Java:
|
Yes
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Battery
life:
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7 hours talk / 10 days standby
|
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