It's black slim with a plastic finish so fine, that you can see the circuitry that makes the buttons work. A silver touch wheel and Motorola logo on the front, a keypad lock button on one side, and volume button on the other just add to the sleekness of the phone.

The best part is that there is no distinguishable keypad on this phone; the entire surface is smooth, letting tiny bumps guide you to where numerals lie hidden. And even this morphs; when you dial or use the phone as a, well, phone the entire surface comes alive with numerals and letters. Start playing music and only the music related keys are lit, making selections and playing them a treat for the eyes, ears and fingers.

Unfortunately for the E8, things just get worse from here. While music playback is great, with a standard earphone port letting you attach the acoustic phones of your choice, and 2 gigs of internal storage to let you store your music; all the functionality for the music is downright annoying. The touch wheel, a la the iPod, is so sensitive that selecting anything becomes a fight between clicking and getting the touch just right.



It's not even complete, it looks as though the designers started to make a wheel, and left it just before it was finished, leaving your fingers very confused. Even the 'Haptic touch', slight vibrations that are supposed to fool you into believing you are touching a proper push button when your just touching a plain surface, doesn't work. Hours of use just leave you with a slight tingling in your fingers, while you still haven't found the menu you were looking for.

The keypad aside, Motorola seems to have shrunken the screen, while everyone else is expanding it. The result is a tiny window that gives below average contrast and colour, and just isn't enough to click pictures with. On the positive side, the call quality is quite good.

Granted that this is a cool looking music-centric phone, unfortunately it doesn't do the two things that are expected of the best - click decent pictures and connect to WiFi, this isn't music to anyone's ears. A software upgrade can probably save it, but till then, look elsewhere.