Motorola ROKR First Apple iTunes Phone Launches on Cingular

Finally hitting the streets, the ROKR iTunes phone is available from Cingular retail stores, Cingular online, and Amazon (standard rebates/deals)! And we have ALL the details on it!

A phone living two lives, the ROKR has a dedicated music button that toggles between music player and phone modes. A bit pricey at $249 MSRP (that’s WITH a 2-year agreement!), but it’s likely to take off as the Sony Walkman phones haven’t really hit yet, and it packs in some amazing capabilities. Newsflash: Amazon is now listing the phone, with $150 in rebates – that’s only $99 after rebate with new signup.

The phone weighs in at 3.77oz (107g), and is 4.25″ x 1.81″ x .80″ in size – a pretty standard ‘candy bar’ phone overall. It also has the now-usual 176x220 pixel color LCD that most phones of this size pack in, but also sports dual speakers for ‘Surround’ sound audio. Some additional pack-in features are Bluetooth call support, a VGA camera with video recording, music ringtones, full speakerphone, MPEG4 encoding/decoding, photo caller ID and photo phonebook, and a microSD (i.e., TransFlash) card slot for extra storage for songs, photos, and videos. Well, not ‘extra’ storage – the phone requires the microSD card to play music. YWZA.

The phone comes with a USB cable for syncing, and stereo headphones (not yet known whether they are Apple earbuds or not). Unfortunately, it looks like the USB connection is USB1, given an estimate of 30s to transfer one 4MB song to the phone (USB2 would probably do it in 4 seconds!). Oh well. Actually, what’s the real let-down is that iTunes playlist management can’t be done over Bluetooth, which would at least be the wireless equivalent speed-wise to the USB cable. And, you can’t use Bluetooth to listen to music either. So the Bluetooth funcionality is a real BUMR.

Battery life sounds pretty impressive. Talk time is rated up to 560 min maximum (that’s 9 hours, but Motorola’s site gives a low-end estimate of 260 min, or 4 hours), while Standby time is rated up to 230 hrs (9 days, but again Moto’s low-end is 160 hrs, or 6.6 days). Even at the low-end estimates, it beats a ton of phones out there. Of course, we want to listen to music on the ‘iTunes phone’, and playback time is rated at 15 hours with a wired headset, or 6 hours using the internal speakers in ‘Surround Sound’ mode. Overall pretty impressive.

Cingular notes the ROKR comes with iTunes software, USB cable, travel charger, stereo headset and a 3.5mm headset adaptor (which means the phone doesn’t sport a 3.5mm jack…), and (updated!) a SanDisk 512MB microSD memory card. Though, I’d think you could fit more than 100 songs on a 512MB card – maybe I use higher compression than the rest of the world!

Again, the ROKR is available at Cingular retail shops and online, and is now available via Amazon as well. We’ll update this post as other online shops show it available.

Read on for the full press release.