Motorola ROKR E6 (MOTOROKR E6)

Discontinued
6th December 2006

A new ROKR? Sort of. The Motorola ROKR E6 certainly is new and a little unexpected - it's a very stylish Linux smartphone with very capable multimedia support. And thankfully it shares almost nothing in common with the original ROKR (we called it the FLOPR), even to the extent that the ROKR E6 doesn't have iTunes support. True, the ROKR E2 was a iTunes-less Linux device too, but the ROKR E6 is hugely different.

There's no mistaking the RAZR-like styling on the MOTOROKR E6. Although it's a predictable thing for Motorola to do, it does look quite fresh on this type of PDA-style device. At just 14mm thick, the E6 is sleeker than most of the competition too.

The main feature on the ROKR E6 is the large 2.4" touch-sensitive screen with 240x320 pixels in 262,000 colours. Unusually for Motorola, the ROKR E6's memory expansion is using SD cards rather than microSD cards, and the E6 can take up to 2Gb of memory. On the back is a 2 megapixel digital camera, and the MOTOROKR E6 also has stereo Bluetooth and an FM radio.

Multimedia support is pretty comprehensive - the ROKR E6 supports MP3, AAC, WMA, RealMedia, WMR, WAV, MPEG4, H.263 formats and others. Audio can be played back either through a 3.5mm socket connection orstereo Bluetooth headphones. Media can be transferred to the phone via a USB 2.0 cable or by using a memory card reader.

Motorola are pushing the entertainment features of the ROKR E6, but this is a fully featured PDA with a web browser, email client, Microsoft Office viewer and a full set of personal information management (PIM) functions.

One potential drawback is that the E6 appears to be a GSM phone only, although it's possible that it might have EDGE data support in addition to GPRS (although this is not clear at present).

The MOTOROKR E6 looks great and appears to be very capable when it comes to features, but at the moment the ROKR E6 has only been announced for the Chinese market where it will be available this month.

We would very much like to see the Motorola ROKR E6 available in markets worldwide, as the combination of design and technology looks to be very appealing.

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