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It barely seems any time at all has passed since I reviewed Motorola's bendy slider the Z10, and here I am looking at another new handset from the beleaguered manufacturer.

This time the phone in question is the MOTO ROKR E8. Now, I am not going to go on again about Moto's seemingly never-ending desire for four letter CAPITALISED handset names. (RIZR, RAZR, KRZR, SLVR, PEBL, ‘nuff said).

Instead I will make a quick comment on the ROKR line. The ROKR E8 picks up a line that started with the dreadful original ROKR, which was meant to revolutionise music phones. Developed along with Apple to support iTunes it had a 100 song limit even when you used the microSD card slot to expand the built in memory. Huh? You say. Well, it was a disaster of a mobile phone, and in a way it is a surprise that Moto wants to keep the ROKR name alive. Still, here we have the ROKR E8. It has 2GB of built in memory, which is nice, and a microSD card slot for adding more, which is nicer.

It is a quad-band GSM handset with GPRS and EDGE. The absence of 3G is an irritation if you are keen on a music mobile that can also do the speedy Internet thing for music downloading or any other activity such as the two-way video calling thing.

The size of this phone may also be a problem. Its 53mm of width, 10.6mm of thickness and 100g of weight are all acceptable enough, but it is very tall at 115mm. It felt rather chunky in my own smallish hands as a result, and my pockets grumbled at having to accommodate it too.

Given the available front fascia size the weeny screen is a bit disappointing. It is not the usual tall portrait-orientated screen typical of most mobile phones, but is instead wide and measures 2-inches diagonally. Its 262 thousand colours and 320 x 240 pixels are clear and sharp enough, but it just looks lost in the vastness of the front fascia.

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