This is why I wait for second generation releases. The Motorola ROKR E8 was Moto’s first music phone to use the proprietary ModeShift technology. Roughly six months later, Motorola releases the new ROKR EM30, a cheaper second generation ROKR that spells 2008’s high end music phone market for Motorola.

But high end is actually a misnomer as the EM30, though improving on a number of features the previous ROKR didn’t execute so well at, is actually much cheaper, going into the $200.00 mark. No final price has yet been released but it supposedly is now targeting the mid-market range, having high end features.

Perhaps the biggest improvement to the EM30 is the new front panel for data input. The previous ROKR had some issues with its “too futuristic” design having one huge panel for you to input text. At the end of they day, it became such a chore to even select the next icon on the menu because the touch sensitive pad was either too sensitive or not sensitive at all. It was a pain to navigate. The EM30 fixes this problem by implementing solid buttons to press down on, charaterized by pieces of plastic jutting out of the real estate to ensure your thumb that it’s pressing the right buttons. The joystick was also improved, sans the half wheel navigation feature that was more of a pain than pleasure to use.

The ModeShift technology has also been improved a bit. Now, the icons change color as well when you shift to other modes. For instance, the keypad glows blue when in phone mode and red when in music player mode.

Not much has been sacrificed with the ROKR – instead of the huge internal memory of the previous device, the new EM30 has only 30MB of internal storage but its expansion slot can accommodate up to 8GB of data.

Other features include:

FM Radio with RDS
2.0MP camera w/ Digital Zoom
3.5mm stereo input
Microsoft Music EcoSystem Support
GPRS during calls
Text2Speech Recognition

Post from: Cellphone9

A week before the get together, the organizers announced that all attendees should bring in mobile phones with FM radio built into the hardware and should tune in during the get together to various stations for English, Spanish and the local dialect real time translations. Here’s another great example of how everyday personal technology can be applied to what could have been a logistical nightmare. Although there were FM radios stationed outside the conference hall, I did notice a great number of folks toting Nokia mobile phones since most of the fairly recent models all have FM radio capability.

So there it was. We were tuned in to a translator giving real time translations to all three languages of the one hour get together.

(Rather funny how during the “test run” the translator would say, “if you hear me, please nod your head” and a sea of 3,000 people would simultaneously nod — how’s that for a flashmob concept!!)

Post from: Cellphone9