Motorola will ship its latest ROKR music phone later this month, the company announced this week. It entirely failed to mention Apple's iTunes, the software the original ROKR was launched to support, pushing instead the handset's PDA-like styling and functionality.

The ROKR E6 is still a media phone: the slimline, 1.5cm-thick handset sports dedicated music keys and an FM radio. The E6 has 8MB of on-board user memory, but it'll take 2GB SD cards, Motorola said. It's got Bluetooth on board with wireless stereo support. There's a 3.5mm earphone socket so you can use a pair of regular cans. In place of iTunes: RealPlayer.

The phone has a huge 2.4in, 240 x 320, 262,144-colour touch-screen display and a stylus ready to use with the handset's PDA features, including a business card reader, email, and Microsoft Office and PDF document readers.

The E6's on-board camera is a two megapixel job with an 8x digital zoom and the ability to capture 320 x 240 video. Motorola said the phone has a 1,000mAh battery, good for 14 hours' music playback, it claimed.

The E6 will ship later this month, though Motorola didn't detail which regions it'll go on sale in or how much the phone will cost. ®