Motorola recently released its fancy ROKR E8 music phone in Asia, in an attempt to answer the mobile music needs of Asian users. Although the handset was officially announced in September 2007, Motorola delayed its global launch for April 2008 - a bit too much for many of those who were expecting to get their hands on the device.

Only 10.6 millimeters thick, Moto ROKR E8 is one of the slimmest music phones currently on the market. The handset has quite a nice design, coming with a flat, touch-sensitive keypad that can morph to offer easy control over different functions: music player, photo camera or phone-only features. Moreover, the phone offers a 2 inch TFT display with 320 x 240 pixel and 256K color support, navigation scroll wheel, 3.5mm audio jack, quad-band GSM connectivity with GPRS and EDGE, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, stereo FM radio, email, WAP 2.0 and HTML browser, Instant Messaging, USB 2.0, Java MIDP 2.0, handsfree, a 2 Megapixel camera with video, 2GB of internal memory (enough to store a high number of MP3s) and microSD card slot.

The phone measures 115 x 53 x 10.6 millimeters, weighs 100 grams and includes a 970 mAh Li-Ion battery that should keep it going for up to 5 hours in talk-time mode and up to 300 hours in stand-by mode.

All in all, the ROKR E8 is nevertheless a cool handset and had Motorola launched it half a year ago, it would have probably been a great commercial success. But since the device was only recently made available, I'm not sure if Moto will manage to sell it in as many units as it would like to.

Motorola ROKR E8 is available through all the important East Asian mobile retail stores, for a price of around $400, depending on the country you buy it from. To complement the phone, Motorola also launched the EQ3 foldable speaker and the EQ5 and EQ7 wireless speaker systems, all of which can be used with the new handset by all those who want to enjoy a unique mobile music experience.