Thread: Motorola Rokr U9 Mobile Phone

With the RAZR series, Motorola made us proud and established itself as a style icon in the mobile market. And now, with the ROKR U9 they are only taking this statement further. And we can easily say that this is one of the best looking phones we have seen till date.

What is most striking about this device is its similarity with the PEBL. It is a clamshell with its upper flap made of reflective glass. The interesting bit is that it displays the active screen saver when in standby mode. The lower panel is of the phone is made up of rubber, which provides a good grip. The volume rocker and the shutter release are on the left panel, and on the right side is the voice command key.

Opening the clamshell reveals the 2.0-inch screen and a flat keypad. With the D-pad in the centre, the sides comprise of selection keys, music and back keys and call accessing keys. The alphanumeric keypad, despite being flat, is very comfortable. As is the obvious expectation from a ROKR series phone, the Moto ROKR U9 displays outstanding music capabilities. The music player is in-built and for the FM radio a stereo Bluetooth device has been provided. The music quality of the phone is pretty good, but it lacks power.

In the sound set-up there are options like spatial audio and bass boost to enhance the quality of your music. One thing though, while using equaliser presets the bass boost function became inactive. We could con¬nect and disconnect the phone to the Bluetooth device while the music was playing and vice versa. Music management was easy. Even creating playlists and filtering them according to artists, albums, genres, or composers was an option. The best part was that while accessing music player. the translucent glass screen turned into touch keys. Moreover, to avoid any accidental commands we could lock these keys hy pressing the camera key.

Another interesting feature added is the music If) application, a traditional feature of Sony Ericsson's Walkman series phones. All we needed to do was to place the phone near the speaker and with in 30 seconds the song would be identified. We had an option to buy music from the Motorola's music store and if not available look out for similar songs. As far as identification goes, it could identify latest and moderately old (but popular) Hindi and English songs. As mentioned earlier the Bluetooth headset comes with inbuilt FM radio with good reception and average sound quality.



The Moto ROKR U9 comes with a 2.0 mega pixel camera and 8x zoom. In the camera mode the D-pad becomes the key to access and operate features like zoom, colours, exposure value, etc. It saves one from the hassle of browsing through the 'Settings' menu. Other interesting features are auto timer and multi shot.

In the video mode the highest resolution available is 176 x 144, which gives an average quality for recordings videos. The D-pad controls remain the same in the video mode as well. The editing option for photographs are very basic and advanced options like adding text or clip art have not been provided.

The Net surfing experience is convenient and easy as the phone detects the settings automatically. However, the small screen of the phone did make viewing Web pages a bit cumber some. The phone tools CD and the music player CD come with the pack and we realised that syncing the phone and transferring files to the PC was pretty easy. The phone also provides options to take backup of the phone's contacts, tasks, etc.

But to use such features, the phone requires a strong battery. backup. The Moto ROKR U9 did not score well here. The battery touched low levels within three hours of music and one hour of talking. We also found that the phone was slow in responding to the commands. The upside: there are a number of freebies in the sales pack of this phone: device covers for men and women, chords to connect the universal USB cable, wired headsets, 1GB microSD card, and off course, the Bluetooth headset 5705.