We go down many years with our column ‘The forgotten phone’ and now we have come to the year 2007. In that year, a very special Motorola phone was released: the Motorola ROKR E8. This phone had a very unique user interface. We update you on it this week.
Motorola ROKR E8
At first glance, the Motorola ROKR E8 looked like a pretty basic, standard phone. Until the lights came on. For this was not just any phone, but one with completely unique controls. Namely, the interface adapted itself, according to what there was to do on the screen. We will come back to this later. The device offered a 2.0-inch screen with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. Motorola equipped the ROKR E8 with the Linux- and Java-based MOTOMAGX OS.
For internet browsing (via 2G), you could use the Opera Mini browser. Furthermore, the phone offered Bluetooth, an FM radio and 2GB of storage. You could easily expand this yourself with a memory card. For taking photos, the phone offered a 2 megapixel camera. The Motorola ROKR E8 came with a 970 mAh battery that you could swap out. The device measured 115 x 53 x 10.7 millimetres and weighed 100 grams.
Back to the screen, where the special feature of this device was to be discovered. The numeric area, where the keys were normally found, could adjust their function. This was called ModeShift technology. Thus, these numbers gave way to other buttons when using the music player. The large scroll wheel remained, but next to it we saw buttons for pausing the music or moving to another track. The scroll wheel also allowed you to scroll through your list of music tracks. Near the camera, we saw buttons for zooming in with the camera, for example, or just to take a picture. All keys were touch-sensitive, so there was no touchscreen.
Motorola ROKR E8 summarised in 3 points
- Special controls
- ModeShift interface
- 2.0-inch screen
