Motorola ROKR EM30

Status: 🟣 Engineering sample, fully functional

There was a very rough period in my life: after being expelled and before leaving for the army, I studied for a year at a university on a paid basis. My ROKR E2 stopped working reliably—the joystick started acting up, and the side panels began falling off—so I left it at home and took my trusty Motorola C380 along with some random Chinese media player. Around that time, a new phone appeared on the market—the most affordable music phone from the Chicago-based company, running Linux. I wanted it badly, spent ages staring at it through store windows, begged to hold it (which got me banned from several mobile shops, lol), but I had so little money that I sometimes had to choose between a train ticket to university or dinner.

The phone was built on the chassis of the more expensive Motorola ROKR E8 but had a much simpler keyboard and less internal memory. Both phones were designed to compete with iPods of that era, as suggested by their landscape-oriented displays and even the Omega Wheel scroll wheel on the higher-end model. However, it was the ROKR EM30 that truly stuck in my memory. If not for Nokia’s super-hit 5130, which became the cheapest music phone on the market, this little guy would have rightfully taken its place.

After returning from the army, the idea of buying the ROKR EM30 faded into oblivion since Motorola had left Russia. Besides, touchscreen smartphones were becoming increasingly popular, which led me to switch to Nokia. But something in my head kept nagging at me—I would still remember that small, charming brick at least once a year.

Fourteen years later, I finally found one for sale. It turned out to be no ordinary unit, but an engineering prototype. Under the battery, there was even a sticker with the developer’s email address, to whom the device had been issued for personal use. What a gift!