It's been known for a while that Motorola and Apple were collaborating on making a new handset combining the best of two of the most successful devices of our generation - the cellular phone and the Ipod.

Today's the day it's finally been announced - and the phone is called the Motorola ROKR E1 (pronounced ROCKER). The phone is the first ever to feature the Apple ITunes software - specially optimised for the mobile phone. This will make playing songs on your phone easier than before - allowing to create playlists, sort your song by album, genre and so on.

Sounds good? The disappointment is to follow.

The handset looks like the Motorola E398 and in fact, little has changed apart from a TFT LCD screen with more colours. The camera is the same: VGA 640 x 480 with video capture - quite a strange decision considering the plethora of 1 megapixel-plus handsets hitting the markets nowadays.

This decision is not as strange, however as the one to use the Micro-SD card format - only allowing a paltry 512MB maximum at the moment, this really isn't going to be enough to become a serious MP3 alternative (around 100 songs in AAC format).
The same criticism was levelled at Sony Ericsson's W800i handset too - but the memory can be expanded to 1GB (and it features a 2 megapixel camera).

As it stands on phone specs the Motorola ROKR lags behind the W800i by some distance - and arguably even the 18-month old Nokia 6230. It could be understandable if the cellular technology was sacrificed somewhat to produce a better MP3 player, but clearly, this hasn't been the case.

The view around our office: Apple has fed Motorola scraps here. There's hardly any Ipod branding or styling on the phone and when you think about it, it's easy to understand. Success for the ROKR could only mean a decay for Apple's own Ipod market - a conflict of interests, in truth.

Contrast Apple's two most recent products - the ROKR - which brings absolutely nothing new to the scene (most recent phones have MP3 players, too), and the Ipod Nano - at just 42g for 4GB of music - a product to really make you say 'WOW'.

With new phones like the Nokia N91 just around the corner - the future for the ROKR, in truth, doesn't look that promising unless higher capacity versions are released.

As usual, to comment further, just make a post in our forum. In the meantime you can check on the full spec and release date of the phone here: http://www.motorola.com/mediacenter/news/detail/0,,5928_5890_23,00.html