General
Motorola Rokr is based on the Motorola E398 and there are a lot of common features, both hardware and software, in these handsets like VGA camera, 256K color screen with 176 x 228 pixel resolution, a good battery, browser support and a lot more. The main difference is that Motorola Rokr is able to synchronize itself with ITunes and can play tracks from ITunes music store.
Motorola Rokr is more or less a bar style tri-band handset, supporting 3 GSM bands i.e. GSM 900, GSM 1800, and GSM 1900. The handset was announced in September 2005 and is currently available in the market. The expected price of the handset is about 250 USD.
Design & Display
Motorola Rokr is one of the light weighing handset and weighs only about 107 grams (3.77 oz) with the dimensions of 4.25" x 1.81" x 0.80" (108 x 46 x 20 mm) and the handset occupies a volume of only 89 cc.
Although the handset weighs more than Nokia 7380 and Nokia 7360, whose weight is in two figures but still the handset is lighter than other handsets like Motorola Razr V3x, thinnest and light weight claiming handset, which weighs 18 grams more than Motorola Rokr. Same is with the Nokia E-Series and Sony Ericsson's popular brands, which are always the heaviest handsets.
As compared to volume, Motorola Rokr occupies more space than other handsets. It occupies 26 cc more than the Nokia 7380, which occupies 63 cc of space. Same happens when comparing with other handsets like Nokia 7360 occupying 72 cc of space and Nokia 7370 occupying 73 cc. So in the case of occupying space Motorola Rokr is not optimized.
Motorola Rokr has a 256K color TFT display screen with 18-bit color depth. The screen is of 30 x 37 mm size and having the resolution of 176 x 228 pixels.
The display is quite good as it is the sane as in most of the handsets today. Thanks to Motorola that it has decided to shift from the traditional 64K color screen and provided a 256K color display in order to align itself to other popular brands like Sony Ericsson brands W550, W900, P990 and some of the Nokia's brands like Nokia 3250 and Nokia 7370 are providing 256 K color screen. But there are handsets that provide even better display screen having 16M colors. Yes, you are right; I am talking of Nokia and to be more specific Nokia E-Series. So Motorola needs to work on the screen colors as well because Nokia is providing even better screen than Motorola's brands.
Coming to screen size, Motorola Rokr is providing a 176 x 228 pixel screen. The screen is far better than Nokia 7380's 104 x 208 pixel screen and a little better than Motorola E770 and Sony Ericsson W550 which provide 176 x 220 pixel screen. But don't make false assumptions; the above mentioned handsets are ranked at the bottom in case of screen resolutions.
What would you say about the screens of Sony Ericsson W900 and p990, obviously they are far better than the screen of Motorola Rokr providing 240 x 320 pixel screens. There are even Motorola's brands Motorola E1070 and Motorola Razr V3x which provide 240 x 320 pixel screen. Till now I have not mentioned anything about the screens of Nokia E-series, Nokia E-61 is equipped with 240 x 320 pixels and Nokia E-60 has a 352 x 416 pixels wide screen, which is the best screen I have seen. So overall Motorola Rokr lacks in the better screen quality and should have had a better screen in order to compete in the market.
Battery Life
Motorola Rokr is equipped with Standard Li-Ion battery that used to give about 540 minutes of GSM talk time and can be active in stand by mode for about 230 hours (9.6 days) in a single battery charging.
Regarding the battery talk time, it is the best battery that I can think of. The battery is as good in giving talk time as Sony Ericsson P990's battery which also gives the talk time of 540 minutes in a single battery charge, which is about 3 times more than the time we get from Motorola E770 battery. This is the extra ordinary performance of any battery that one desires.
Now about the Stand-by time, the battery's stand-by performance is too bad and insufficient to meet today's needs. The performance of the battery is same as of the Motorola E1070, one of the bad batteries. Most of the handsets used to provide a better stand-by performance and used to give more than 300 hours generally. Consider Motorola E770, whose battery talk time is 3 times less than Motorola Rokr's talk time but it is giving 320 hours of standby time which is about 100 hours more than Motorola Rokr's battery. Think of Sony Ericsson P990's battery which is giving about the same talk time as of this handset but on the other hand P990's stand-by performance is also consistent and although is not the best of all but still able to give about 170 extra hours than Motorola Rokr's battery, total of 400 hours. I would definitely add that Nokia 7360's stand by time is the best, totaling of 450 hours, which is about 2 times more than the Motorola Rokr's battery performance.
So concluding that although Motorola Rokr's battery is the best if we consider only the talk time performance but on the other hand it is one of the poorest if we consider the stand-by performance, so a lot of work is needed to improve the stand-by performance.