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Motorola have shown their hand with the next generation of the iPod inspired iTunes phone, or is it?

After the poor reception to Motorola’s first iTunes phone, the Motorola ROKR E1, the world waited with baited breath to see a mobile phone/iPod hybrid which could live up to the hype generated by Motorola and Apple. Finally the development team at Motorola have unveiled what’s planned to save the concept.

So what has been improved on this generation of ROKR? Well first of all we have dedicated side mounted music buttons, making it easier to start playing from your pocket, a 1.3 megapixel camera with flash, a huge improvement over the originals standard VGA offering, and, perhaps the biggest improvement room for 5x as many songs as the E1’s 100 song maximum.

Another clever feature of the phone is the way you can plug standard headphones into it. So for audiophiles out there you can use high quality headphones via a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. Taking it to another level, the ROKR E2 now has the capability to stream music via Bluetooth to a Bluetooth headset meaning you can get your music without any wires.

So what’s wrong with the new ROKR E2? Well, although the design has been substantially improved it’s still a long way from being as desirable as an iPod, and therefore many of the criticisms we had in our article “Where to go next for the iPod mobile phone” still stand, however there is one more glaring problem.

Shockingly the ROKR E2 does not include iTunes! Motorola instead chooses to provide some software for transferring the music files but obviously the additional functions of the iTunes software is lost and makes this a huge disadvantage for those who have chose to use iTunes as their music download program of choice. It also creates a huge amount of brand confusion as customers tend to associate the ROKR with iTunes and we may see many returns of this model simply based on that omission. There are rumours that Apple imposed a small song capacity in order to not affect sales of the iPods, so maybe the reason for the lack of iTunes stems from the fact that the ROKR E2 has an impressive song capacity and they believe that this improvement will be more attractive to consumers than iTunes.

Keep up to date with the best deals on the market for the ROKR E2 as it comes close to it’s release date in the first half of 2006 by checking our Motorola ROKR E2 best deals table.