Since I've returned from CES 2006, I haven't had the chance to post much about the phones and services I saw. Here's a first glance at the Motorola E2.

For some time, there had been talk of an iPhone, produced by Apple.  Then Apple and Motorola announced their partnership on a new phone which ended up being the Motorola E1 ROKR--the first iTunes phone.  And despite everyone's complaints about this phone, it seems to have done fine so far in the market.

Despite its success, the E1 was built on an older device, the E398 (which was why I chose it to be the first phoneI reviewed).  The time has come to build a new ROKR phone, and Motorola has dubbed it the E2.  You can find the specs on it here, but I wanted to give you a quick preview of the short time I had with the phone at CES 2006.

First, it smaller and more rounded than the E1, but has a nice feel to it.  There are easy access and backlit media player buttons (the standard Walkman like Play/Pause, FF, R, Stop) on the side, so there's no need to navigate to the media player on the phone and using the joystick to control the player like on the E1.  The interface is new, based on Linux.  I still don't care for the way it looks, but maybe someone will come up with nicer skins and icons for it.  I'm not totally sure if the phone will be iSync compatible, but it should be, because there is a new synchronization app on the phone that allows for both SyncML (the same standard that iSync uses) as well as for Microsoft Exchange (though I'm still not clear if it works with ActiveSync).

This phone is also the first phone that works with Motorola's recently announced service called iRadio.  Think of it as iTunes plus channels of music.  You can sync individual songs from the iRadio software on your computer (PC only at the moment), as well as radio-like channels of content.  You have these songs on the go with you, just like on the E1, but what sets the phone apart is that you can stream the music / content over stereo bluetooth to compatible devices.  At the CES 2006, Motorola also showed off a bluetooth car and home stereo receivers that not only allowed playback of music, readout of the track info, but even control of the E2 via the car's factory head unit.  The car's connection to this bluetooth receiver was done via the head-unit's CD-changer connection.

The reason this was interesting is because it allowed for a seemless transition of listening to your music wherever you are--at home, on foot, or in the car, and the devices around you just respond to your phone.  It was a slick system, but we'll have to see if Motorola can pull it off.

As for the media application on the E2, there's only the iRadio application (though I'm not sure it was called that on the E2 itself).  Frankly, it felt a little clunky, as did most of the functions on the phone.  This had probably more to do with the phone I played with being a non-production version.  The speed of the interface is likely to improve with the production version.  Song selection was done from a listing by Artist, the album, then individual song, and there didn't appear to be other ways to sort that song selection, like there is on an iPod.  When you select a song, the album art is displayed.  Pretty standard.  In case I haven't conveyed the point, there's no iTunes on this phone--at least at the moment.  After talking to a Motorola developer at CES, the decision to include an iTunes application on the phone is essentially up to the carrier, and that it was possible to put the application on the phone (even if it's running Linux).  That would make sense, since I believe that the iTunes mobile application is just a J2ME program, much like Google Maps.

So are we likely to see the E2 in the US market?  Good question.  I think the phone's destiny more coincides with a carrier's adoption of iRadio as its music delivery system, more than it does with the actual E2 device.  It's a GSM phone, so at least for the U.S., the phone will be carried by TMobile or Cingular, if at all.