Apple certainly knows how to do music players, and Motorola has had its moments with handsets. But can the two come together in a music playing handset that cuts the mustard? The two companies clearly think so, as Motorola's ROKR E1 incorporates Apple's iTunes software. But we're not so sure the marriage works.

Music playing aside, the ROKR E1 is a fairly average handset. It has calendar software, Java, tri-band operation, a VGA camera with flash, Bluetooth and e-mail support among its specifications. There's nothing too fancy here, and anyone looking for state of the art is going to be disappointed, but the basics are covered.

In hardware design terms, too, the ROKR E1 is a bit disappointing. It certainly lacks the Apple panache when it comes to looks, being a little plasticky and somewhat on the large side (108mm tall by 46mm wide and 20.5mm high). However, it is of average weight at 107g and its 262,000-colour screen is a shining example of good display technology, being bright and clear.

There is a certain 'yoof' appeal to be found, with the flashing lights on the left and right sides of the screen which can be set to do their thing; as part of incoming call alerts being the most obvious example.

So what about the iTunes side of things? This has its good and its very annoying points. On the positive side, sound output through the provided (white of course) headphones is great, as are volume, quality and stereo through the speakers that sit on the left and right sides of the ROKR E1's screen.

The iTunes software itself is easy to get to grips with. A dedicated button below the screen launches it and thereafter it is controlled by the two soft-keys, a joypad and the handset's menu button. A lot of controls, perhaps, but the system is intuitive enough. The interface looks familiar and the software copes with playlists downloaded from your PC as well as displaying album art. So far so good.

Here come the annoyances. Data transfer from iTunes on the PC is painfully slow; for some reason the handset is USB 1.1 only. And the ROKR E1 can only access 100 tunes at a time. This might sound like a lot, but why impose a limit at all? Music is stored on a microSD card (the format you might know better as TransFlash).

These cards are tiny, about a quarter the size of SD cards, and in the ROKR E1's case you get a 512MB card with the handset. That's the largest card available at the moment, but capacities are set to rise, while the 100 tune limit on the ROKR won't. And you can't download music into iTunes over the air, so you are forced to make a PC link for data transfer.

The ROKR E1 is a nice enough handset, but it is definitely a phone with iTunes built in rather than an iTunes phone. The difference is significant, and as it is not particularly cheap it is not an especially compelling choice of music handset.