Did Apple Sabotage the ROKR?
An artificial limit of 100 songs? What the heck? Motorola CEO, Ed Zander doesn’t think anyone needs more than that…at least according to a rant that he spewed when the ROKR went over like, well, a rock. But was Zander’s frustration directed toward the poor reception his new iTunes-capable phone got - or at Apple?
The iPod has been a force that has brought about the second coming of Apple. Millions sold in each of the past couple of years. New models introduced seemingly every month. White ear buds adorning every other person on the streets. The “Halo Effect”.
What could possibly topple the reign of Apple’s iPod? Microsoft hasn’t been successful in championing any competitive products. Who else could? What else could? While every other person may be sporting white ear buds, just about EVERYone has got a cell phone in their pocket. MP3 capable cell phones aren’t a new idea, but they’ve been around long enough that it seems like high time they really take off. And what then? What happens to Apple’s mighty iPod when everyone’s cell phone is playing music on the go?
A couple weeks back, WIRED ran an article detailing the start to ‘finish’ of the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone, as well as all planning and interaction between Motorola, Apple, and Cingular - the eventual carrier to pick up the iTunes phone. Definitely go read the article. There are some great insights as to the obstacles and hurdles that stood in the way of the “iTunes phone”.
So obviously cell phones pose a valid threat to the venerable iPod. Whatever is Apple to do? How about get an iTunes enabled cell phone on the market and lure people towards the phone version of their favorite mp3 player? Sounds like a great idea, and that’s just what they went a head and did with a friendly partnership with Motorola. Unfortunately, Motorola found out that Apple will have things their way, period.
If you’ve already popped over and read the WIRED article by this point, you found that Apple mandated the artificial 100 song limit on the ROKR. Why would they possibly do that? There doesn’t seem to be a good, or real explanation in WIRED’s article. Come launch day, a 1,000 song iPod nano was announced which subsequently trounced the ROKR in sales and popularity.
So try this on for size:
Could Apple have possibly gone into the ROKR project with a hidden agenda to sabotage the final product’s success? Why not? It may serve to sway public opinion of mp3 cell phones. If the Apple iTunes cell phone flops, how great could mp3 cell phones really be? Might potential mp3 cell phone buyers take a step back and choose to stick with carrying their iPod in tandem with their cell phones? It might be worth another few million iPod units sold before someone comes along with the killer mp3 phone. Maybe. Maybe?
Well today Motorola announced a new version of the RAZR which will be iTunes capable. There’s no confirmation (that I’ve been able to find) that there’s a 100 song limit imposed on the forthcoming RAZR. Might it be the late-to-the-party hit that Motorola was hoping for in the ROKR? Possible. Much more likely I’d say.
Is any of this really plausible? Possibly. Probably not. It’s largely based off my wild imagination and a slightly suspicious psyche. But you can’t argue that Apple - at the very least - made a poor decision in releasing a mobile iTunes app that’s limited to 100 songs. How could that possibly be a recipe for success?
What do you think?
Trackbacks/Pingbacks (Trackback URL)
Comments RSSComments
#1 Dave says:Is that sabotage? Maybe they view the ROKR as an add-on to your apple kit. It should not be viewed as a replacement for the ipod, because it isn’t. Consider the user that has no need for a big ipod, he can get a shuffle or he could get the ROKR if he happens to be in the market for a new phone at the time. You wouldn’t want a hard disk based phone would you?
Ok a nano with a phone would be something else but maybe the phone makers wouldn’t be happy with that level of foray into the phone business… just like Apple isn’t happy about the Sony Walkman phone foray into the MP3 business…
#2 Robert Pritchett says:Captain Kirk’s Communicator didn’t require dialing in, so why should we? Instant-on, say the name, be connected. Who has that unit on sale now?
#3 Kerp says:Either they don’t want the phone thing to take off, or they’ve got something else around the corner. I mean, look at the ROKR, it’s ugly, not Apple’s style at all. If they came out with something that looks like an iPod but works as a phone, they’d wipe the market out. The same way they did by actually giving the MP3 player some style.
#4 Chet says:Did Apple kill it or did Motorola? I can live with the 100 song limit, but I want a good looking phone with the features I’m use to. I played hands on with a ROKR, but it had some big limitations compared to my p900. The transfer rates to fill the card were also quite sad. I don’t mind 100 limit if I can change my songs without waiting an hour.
#5 Scott Hodson says:This was one of the points made in the cover story of Wired, published about a month ago…
“Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/phone.html
#6 Josh Pigford says:Yes Scott…and we linked to that article in our article.
#7 Derrick Smith says:I think it is pretty obvious when you have competition that is in everybody’s pockets you can’t squeeze in more stuff. Could you imagine how big pockets would be in the future? Apple could partner with Levis for IPants.
There is no doubt in the world that a cell phone with 4GB of flash memory and mp3 capability wouldn’t put a dent in the Nano’s sales. On top of this add to the fact that all the cell providers have upgraded their networks to EVDO to allow for faster data transfer and you have a power house of an idea going. 100 Song limit is for the birds. They just wanted to waste money developing a product so they can say they tried it and it failed to write off for a loss. Apple is getting too big for our britches so to speak. Makes you wonder how many other cool ideas have they killed lately.
#8 Jim says:Whining about the 100 song limit is as silly as having it in the first place. Everything’s stored on the Transflash card, which is only 512 meg. You can’t get much more than 100 songs in that space anyway. Apple of course wouldn’t ever agree to a hard drive based phone as it’s a much greater threat to their precious cash cow.
The transflash also is responsible for the slow transfer speed. The maximum transfer rate of the cards is only slightly above that of USB1.1, but way below USB2 - a USB2 interface wouldn’t make a difference.
And anyone that thought this would have over-the-air purchasing ability as a GPRS/EDGE phone is crazy. You need the speeds that won’t show up until HSDPA. There’s an evolution path here.
That said, apple == evil and I wouldn’t put sabotoge past them.
#9 Carsten says:did apple sabotage the ROKR? sure, but not by limiting the number of songs on it, but by introducing the Nano during the same event. that was a case of the beauty and the beast.
what i don’t get is why motorola didn’t use the RAZR as the first phone instead of the thing (ROKR).
#10 Ventura says:.
Just use Linux with Amarok instead this iTunes. You can control iPod, why not Rokr without limits.
#11 Ventura says:.
opppss.
http://amarok.kde.org/
Here you can find your freedom.!
.
#12 John says:Maybe Apple has a longer memory than most people on the Internet. Perhaps this has nothing to do with iTunes, MP3, or the iPod.
At one time, every single Mac was powered by a Motorola CPU. Then, Motorola “standardized” on Windows. Imagine Microsoft mandating that only MacOS could be used by MS employees. Finally, Motorola stopped making the PPC. That left Apple dependent on IBM for its chips - which was a very bad place to be.
I’m not saying Apple sabotaged Motorola. Motorola needed something to follow up on the successful RAZR. Apple threw them a small bone and Motorola let Apple dictate the terms - never a good move.
#13 Jane says:Carsten - there’s a new Moto Razr with iTunes support - but it does have the same problems as the ROKR, but i’m afraid that’s because of the limitations of the microsd chips.
http://www.motorola.com/motoinfo/product/details/0,,130,00.html
#14 nik says:unfortunately the 100 song limit is there, whatever the flash card size. The V3i will accept interchangeable flash cards (micro SD), hence of virtually unlimited size, yet will have the 100 song cap. How sad.
p.s. the (apple == evil) means “check the condition”, and not “evil is assigned to apple” or “apple equals evil”.
#15 Alexander Kniffin says:I don’t know… I think you are second guessing a little early. When the IPod photo came out, I thought it was completely useless - a gimic to sell the IPod at a higher price. Why would anyone want to look at pictures on such a small screen? I now have an IPod video because I found my self thinking the same exact thing about a 2″ TV screen… Apple pushes the limits of technology. They did not wait for cheap LCD screens to come out before releasing the Photo, and they didn’t wait for a perfect storage media before comming out with the ROKR. The technology was there to innovate, and they did it - perhaps as just a test and testimate to their ability to innovate, but with the hope that it leads to newer and better things (How many uses can you now come up with for an iPod photo?)
#16 Peter Ehat says:I, on the contrary, believe that introducing an MP3 player/phone with the specific purpose of jading the public’s opinion of MP3 phones is improbable. You’ll see that competitors will benefit from the ROKR song limit by simply giving the consumers what they want—more capacity. The only way to turn the entire market off to the idea of a cell phone that plays MP3s is to maintain the ROKR as the only such device on the market—which already is not the case (try Googling MP3 phones and you’ll see).
#17 Skywraith says:http://www.ericsson.com/products/images/services/pdf/training/webinar_HSDPA_050617_final.pdf
#18 Derrick Smith says:Jim - Why in the world do you think anyone would need any more than 12Mbits/s (the theoretical maximum of usb 1.1 on a phone when downloading from over-the-air.
EV-DO enabled phones have download speeds of up to 2.4 Mbit/s. The Nano uses flash memory which does not require the use of a hard drive. They didn’t have any problems finding massive quantities of this memory for the Nano either. You would only use transflash to carry data over from one phone to another anyway. Nobody said you had to be able to transfer the songs using flash memory cards. If you wanted to backup the songs you can attach it to a PC by USB or Fire Wire.
USB Info - http://www.everythingusb.com/usb2/faq.htm
EV-DO - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EVDO
or EVDO Info- http://www.evdoinfo.com
#19 Jim says:The OTA and the MiniSD/USB transfer speeds are completely unrelated. GPRS/EDGE networks are entirely too slow to download songs over the air. HSDPA will fix that, eventually with speeds similar to EV-DO.
The USB issue is that if you HAD a usb2 interface, the phone couldn’t transfer the data to the miniSD card much faster than USB1.1 speeds anyway, so the transfer rate is still slow.
#20 J says:The ROKR is ugly because Apple wanted it to be… Its exactly right that Apple wanted to increase sales for the nano. Motorola could have released the ROKR as this sleek phone. Looks kinda like the nano doesn’t it? Chew on that…
#21 JD says:BS! Why would apple tarnish their rep by putting the idea into people’s heads that anything iTunes/iPod related is bad. When I talk with non-techies they just heard it was “a crappy iPod phone”… they dont say “this makes me want an iPod”, rather they look at Dell’s Jukebox, etc.
#22 Ben says:Carsten hit the nail on the head. The ROKR was ill conceived from the start. It was butt ugly, large and not too intuitve to use. If Motorola really wanted to make a home run, they would have let Apple design the phone, but due to Zander’s disdain for Apple, he would never let them actually get close to his R&D department. The irony is i’ts not like Motorola doesn’t know how to make a sexy product like the Nano. The RAZR looks hot and they should have started with that phone or a variant of it instead of the candy bar shaped ROKR.
So in short, like it always does, Motorola sabotaged itself.
DOH!
#23 sambb says:It wouldn’t be the first time apple has crippled something they’ve seen as a direct challenger to their profits.
See USB2 which runs at half the speed it should under OSX whilst firewire runs at full speed.
I keep hearing stories about apple more and more regularly which make me start to wonder about their business ethics.
Slippery slope to microsoftdom i reckon.
#24 Piku says:Looks like a very important detail of the whole Motorola, Apple deal has been overlooked. Regardless of whether or not
Apple wanted the product to fail, they gave license to Motorola for some-odd number of phones to be produced, at a flat-fee per license. That means, even if it doesn’t take off, it still makes them fat cash. On the other hand, if it does take off, they don’t make constant revenue from it.
#25 Bernard Johnston says:Apple did not subotage, and not for this motivaion. Nokia and Sony are on track with their music phone roadmap, and their demand is strong from the mobile operator. Keep in mind operators have a conflicting agenda to iTunes and ROKR was hard-pressed to find a friendly operator until Cingular succumbed.
Apple is a design centric company, including industrial design and interaction design. They do not make compromises on the user experience and focus on certain personnas in their usability process. This sometimes includes sacrifizing functionality which is dear to users who are not the exact target audience. Personally I was amazed that the Shuffle could not play albums or playlists, which is my primary mode of listenning. but Shuffle was doing good because it was designed for someone else.
I have no clue who would want the 100 song limit, but regardless no-one ever expected the first wave of music phone to support gigs of storage. That’s not the issue.
When Motorola chose the hardware pltform for the ROKR, they went with the e398 model which was THE up-and-coming music device at the time. Later on the e398 flopped while the RAZR took off. Now in retrospect, they should have used the RAZR platform, but things looked totally when decisions were made.
While Apple is totally focused on user experience, Motorola is an engineering company. Their products are as exciting and friendly as the military walkie talkie systems they make so succesfully. Motorola is going thru transformation in this field, and it is a shame for them that ROKR did not give them a push but a pushback.
When he launched Photo, Jobs put down the need for video on a player device. Now Video is all the rage. If apple is not seeing succes with Motorola, they could move into this field themselves. They would do a great job. There are some good companies in Korea which they can buy or partner with. The tricky part would be facing the operators, who control 80-90% of the handset market.
Next thing to look out for is Nokia’s emerging music phone, the N91 (http://www.nokia.com/nseries/) Next year…
#26 Ed says:Motorola sabotaged itself by making the phone about as attractive as burned flesh
#27 adam Jackson says:wow! someone was slashdotted haha congratulations
adam
http://mypersonalgetaway.com
#28 InfoMofo says:It’s not “sabotage”, it’s “market stratification”. Apple is so paranoid about canibalizing its own precious market share for its golden goose that it’s going to be very cautious about entering into the cell phone market. However, as an economist, I have to believe that this will bite them in the ass, as there are plenty of phones that outpace the ROKR (and even the ROKR RAZR) in terms of interface, form factor, and technical specs, such as the aforementioned Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones.
It irritates me that cell phone companies are hesitant to pick up on these clearly superior devices because they don’t have the iPod name, and don’t sync with iTunes. Apple is using clear MSFT tactics here, leveraging its dominance on the desktop and portable music market to gain a foothold in the mobile phone market, but it’s not offering a competitive product. I hope this makes consumers and cell phone providers wisen up to the fact that the iTunes interface is not enough to justify using a horrible phone, but I guess I’ve seen more illogical crowd mentalities in the past.
#29 Todd Dwyer says:While this theory does sound plausible, let’s not forget that the cell phones companies are in the business to have their customers to spend money on new phones every 1-2 years. Phones are going out to the market with issues and defects left and right, and the customer has no choice but to pony up the money and roll with the punches.
Does anyone remember the Startac phones from Motorola? They were some of the best phones ever made. If they still made Startac phones, I’d still keep that over my current phone (the really nice, but still buggy e815). Cell phone providers were not happy with this phone series, as they had some of the lowest return rates. Now we are forced to get phones from providers that have features stripped from them such as the infamous v710 and its crippled Bluetooth capability.
iTunes might not take over 100 songs, but you can use the imbedded Motorola Media Player to play extra songs stored on the memory or transflash.
#30 David says:I think we’re overlooking things here. Did Apple restrict the phone to 100 songs? Perhaps. Did they sabotage the ROKR by doing this? NO. Ask yourself this:
Knowing that the ROKR is antiquated (no EDGE support), has a clunky design, cheap feel, poor data transfer rates, substandard camera, and limited Bluetooth capabilities, BUT it could play more than 100 songs, would any of you honestly buy it?
Motorola is solely responsible for the failure of the ROKR. Let’s not start in with the conspiracy theories just yet. Occam’s Razor, my friends;)
#31 flotson says:I’m in the camp that thinks Apple should design an MP3 phone from the ground up. It would no doubt be slick in form and function. They ought to market it under the ipod brand. Would this cut into sales of media-only ipods? Yes. Are media-capable phones going to do this anyway? I think so, most definitely.
I recently purchased a SonyE. k750i, and have to say it’s the finest digital gadget I’ve ever owned. Inspiring more love, even, than my beloved G5 imac (which is also pretty wicked.) It uses memory stick duo for storage, which is currently available up to 2G, competitive with the nano, albeit at a higher price–but you also get–a phone (not to mention the best camera-in-a-phone on the market).
As an aside, I personally have found smaller storage capacity to be more conducive to active listening. 40gigs of music is too much information.
As a smaller and less relevant aside, I also enjoy watching Simpsons, South Park episodes, etc. on my phone’s tiny screen.
I’m all for an all-in-one device. If it only had 3G (as does the most recent Walkman phone).
#32 Scout Zen says:Oh, Apple failed at something…they must’ve done it on purpose!
Typical Mac fanatical response prompted by the far reaching Steve Jobs reality distortion field.
#33 Renato says:I wonder why no one designed a cell phone *add-on* for the iPod. I mean, why not make the iPod act as a cell phone instead of trying that hard to turn a cell phone into an iPod?
#34 Andrew says:I haven’t played around with the ROKR, so I was wondering, can you assign songs in iTunes as ringtones? I have a Motorola V265 right now and I can put a few mp3 files on it, but I can’t use them as ringtones.
Perhaps Motorola realized that if they released a phone with iTunes player capability, the next logical step would be to release a phone with iTunes Music Store functionality. If you can get a whole track for 99 cents, why would you pay $1.99 and up for a 5 or 10 second ringtone clip?
I think that a successul iTunes phone will be developed and released by Apple. That’s really the only way you can get the full “integration” that everyone is after. Once you start involving other companies, everyone starts demanding their cuts and everyone starts demanding concessions.
I personally don’t mind carrying a phone and an iPod. I’d rather have two devices that serve both their purposes extremely well than one device that sucks at both all for the sake of “convergence.”
#35 Carsten says:while i think that motorola sabotaged themselves, it also has to be said that unlike any other company on this planet they were able to get apple’s ok to use the itunes drm. microsoft was not able to do this for the new xbox. so while the phone sucks, they have access to itunes and now with the new razr things might get interesting.
also there is another question, why should a phone have a mp3 player? i would buy an itunes razr, but i would still use my ipod. but then it might just be me liking specialized devices over all in one things that can do many things but nothing really good.
#36 Herb says:mp3 playing cellphones…perhaps they should shoot for mp3 player that can also handle phone calls
#37 Frits van der veen says:My opinion is that Motorola is low profile on the memory size. Since this is mini-SD, this will most probably easily be upgradable. So Motorola does not have to press this hard to not offend Apple.
So Motorola, in my view, will allow larger memory sizes, and without mentioning, they pose a certain threat to the small iPods.
I for myself, I would opt for a cell phone with 1.3 camera and 9 times zoom with video capabilities AND the iPod Movie capabilities. Finally not carrying all these adapters, connection cables, camera supplies, power supplies etc. etc.
Motorola will most probably have a hit on their hands with the RAZR II.
#38 ars_workerbee says:i think the idea that the 100 songs killed the ROKR is ludicrous. sure it contributed to the suckitude, but a bad design of the phone, terribly and slow UI, USB 1.1/”lowspeed” only syncing, etc were what really did it in…
#39 Jurgen says:I’ve posted some rampant speculation on my site about what Apple’s up to with the whole iPod+Phone thing:
http://jurgen.ca/archives/000490.html
I think they’re sucking Moto’s brains a bit here, learning from them. I won’t be surprised if Apple releases an iPod that includes a phone… but it would be an iPod first, not a phone first like the Moto. The Moto is a phone with iTunes in it. Apple would want an iPod with a phone in it. Subtle difference, but vital to the success of any iPod+Phone combo.
#40 John Sample says:I bought a ROKR, I returned it. Honestly the best thing about the phone was iTunes. Every other part of the phone basically sucked. The idea that Apple sabotaged this phone is like saying Apple sabotaged Windows by porting iTunes to the platform. Absurd.
#41 Edwin Martin says:When I saw the video in which the iPos nano would be introduces, I heard about the “iPod phone” and thought: wow, that must be a cool phone.
Then I saw the phone. Argh. Just another ugly cheap-looking phone. I’ll never gonna buy that one.
How is this Apple’s fault?
Has the iPod not proofed that people want to pay extra for good design and ease of use. How hard is this to understand? Motorola messed up. Not Apple.
#42 seth d says:hope i’m not repeating anyone else’s statements…
I think it’s much more likely that the failure was orchestrated by all parties involved. Motorola has a wide array of phones, the sales of all of which would suffer if they actually produced an iPod phone that was worth a shit.
#43 Pakk99 says:For the conspiracy theorist among you…you’re all idiots. Motorola proposed the deal, designed the phone, and begged for iTunes support. In the end, they did a lousy engineering job, and it didn’t sell.
What next? Is Apple also in cahoots with JFK, Elvis, and the CIA that the switch to Intel is a good thing, with the secret plan to put Intel out of business and soldify the PPC chip’s market share? Give me a break.
And who really gives a rip about the 100 song limit on a cell phone anyhow? Its a phone people…a phone.
#44 Pakk99 says:Oops…dropped a word or two in my excitement…the sentence should read, “Is Apple also in cahoots with JFK, Elvis, and the CIA to convince us that the switch to Intel is a good thing, with the secret plan to put Intel out of business and soldify the PPC chip’s market share?”
#45 Pakk99 says:Oops…dropped a word or two in my excitement…the sentence should read, “Is Apple also in cahoots with JFK, Elvis, and the CIA to convince us that the switch to Intel is a good thing, with the secret plan to put Intel out of business and soldify the PPC chip’s market share?”
#46 Paul says:It can be a receipe for success because a bad ROKR definitely helped boost the appeal of the nano. And you don’t think that Apple hadn’t been planning a second special event to announce the 5th gen iPod just a few weeks after the ROKR/nano unveiling? It’s clear that Steve Jobs knows exactly what he is doing.
I don’t think Jobs is a great fan of Swiss Army knife devices. But yet, the momentum was building about how “critical” an iTunes phone was to the iPod’s future. Apple needed to show that it was relatively trivial for them to get into the cell phone business and thus deflate some of the “cell phones will kill the iPod” talk that had been going on for a while. Now everyone suddenly realizes that cell phones can’t do music as well as a dedicated player, especially since most people probably prefer saving their batteries for making important calls than draining it by listening to music.
As the ROKR shows, it takes more than just music capability to make a truly compelling device. The 100 song limit? The real reason is more practical than that. Just like the Shuffle has no scrolling Click Wheel because of its limited capacity, it would become impossibly frustrating to navigate through a list of a 1000 songs with push buttons or paddles. By limiting the songs to 100, Apple can at least hide this flaw in the hardware interface. Don’t underestimate how much Apple values the total user experience, because even though the idea of having 1000 or 5000 songs on your cell phone may seem compelling on paper, it’s very difficult to navigate through a long list by repeatedly pressing buttons, and people are only gong to end up feeling frustrated with the feature.
It’s like the common geek complaint about the “wasted” space on Apple’s 17″ PowerBook. Why, with all that extra surface area, doesn’t Apple put in a numeric keypad? More keys are better, right? It seems like a stupid omission until you realize that putting a numeric keypad would shift the regular keys all to the left. Imagine trying to type off-center for an extended period, your wrists angled non-ergonomically to the left while the PowerBook is sitting centered on your lap.
It all comes down to user experience.
#47 Pakk99 says:I think you overestimate the effect the failure of the ROKR had on Nano sales, although its all specualtion at best. The Nano is a killer device that Apple has had on the drawing board for some time. The ROKR was a poorly planned, slapdash MP3-player/phone desperately seeking a sales hook. So Motorola sought out Apple, and Jobs obliged. Not vice-versa. Apple was prepared to annouce the Nano with or without an iTunes-compatible phone on the agenda. And I think you’re reaching a lot if you belive the Nano wouldn’t have sold as well were it not for the crummy design of the ROKR.
I think it is more likely that Jobs saw an opportunity to make a little extra lisencing cash, but wanted to protect his own product…thus the 100 song limit. But making the claim that Apple intentionally sabotaged a product they didn’t seek out for the sake of boosting Nano sales, is pretty ridiculous. The ROKR investment is reported on Apple’s report to their shareholders. EBad investment decisions, with or without a windfall, do not encourage investor confidence, and ultimately undermine a company’s credibility.
Say what you will, but its also impossible to make the case that the Nano sold well because the ROKR sucked. A Motorola product just doesn’t have the market play that an Apple product does. And iTunes-compatible phone, no matter how well designed, just doesn’t have the sex appeal of an iPod. Even if the ROKR rocked, the Nano was going to be giant.
#48 Pakk99 says:Dang…more spelling issues…I should proofread my stuff.
belive = believe
lisencing = licensing
Man, I need some typing lessons. Sorry for the errors.
#49 Johnny Park says:I think you’re full of shit.
#50 Pakk99 says:Who is full of shit? Me? Or the columnist?
And if me…care to elaborate?
#51 A Nony Mouse says:I doubt it was sabotage, although the fact that Apple mandated the 100-song limit certainly indicates they were protecting their iPod products.
Consider this… the name of the phone was stupid.
ROKR. It conjures visions of Guitar Center, of Otto “likes to get Blotto” from the Simpsons, it’s reminiscent of maladjusted, unpopular kids in school.
RAZR sounds okay. A razor is sharp. A razor is cool. Cut. Cut. Cutting edge. Even the word sounds good. Full of positive mental associations. Sleek, sharp.
You wouldn’t be embarrassed to say you own a RAZR phone. You’d be afraid the other person would laugh at you if you said you owned a ROKR phone.
Mr. Zander is a bit silly. I mean, he managed to be succesful at Sun during the internet bubble… a time when a babboon might have done as well (in his place).
#52 The Dude says:Why do you guys care so much about the poorly executed ROKR when several other iTunes enabled phones will be coming out? That’s like looking at the first airplane and saying, “Man, this thing really sucks; I hope they don’t make any more of these because these Wright guys have really screwed up this whole flying idea.” Motorola’s competitors will have iTunes enabled phones and they will be better; Motorola will also put out new models that will supercede the ROKR. Dwelling on the first issue of any gadget is usually a bad idea; it stymies the creativity put into the execution of future iterations.
As far as the point of Apple vs. phone manufacturers, yes, they are competitors; granted, the phone manufacturers have to license components from Apple. Furthermore, how many people do you think are going to buy a ROKR that don’t already have money invested in iTunes? The ROKR isn’t average joe material but more geared for the Apple-head who has invested time and money into their iTunes collection and doesn’t want to buy an iPod Shuffle to go with their cell phone, iBook, and regular iPod (for the videos, of course). Most people will take the free phone that their cell phone provider is offering and not spend $150 on a phone. That leaves them with $150 to invest in an iPod device or more songs through iTunes. This isn’t even for us, the computer nerds, because we can see what a piece it really is. Instead, the ROKR is just the tip of the iceberg that gives the masses an idea to have wet dreams over and us something to complain about because any press is good press.
I mean, damn, how much time have we now spent on talking about a bad version of a possibly good idea?
#53 Gaz says:Personaly I couldn’t give a toss about a phone being iTunes compatible (i.e. being able to download songs using the phone and being able to transfer songs to the phone using the iTunes player). All I want is a phone with 10gb+ worth of storage space and a decent library navigator/player that can play MP3/AAC files (someone make a Java music player that anyone can use on any CLDC1.1/MIDP2 compatible phone?) so I can listen to my existing music collection on my phone and save an iPod’s worth of pocket space (phone + wallet + camera + iPod = big pockets needed).
All an iPod can do at the moment is store your tunes and play them. It can’t download them from the net for you. You still need to connect it to a PC to do this, as you probably would do with a phone player (why you’d pay huge costs for downloading over a phone when you have pay per month broadband line at home is beyond me).
Bottom line: Not eveyone likes the iTunes store and not everyone is an existing iPod owner/iTunes user. By just making a good player for a good phone with good storage, good looks and a good phone-to-pc interface people will buy it.
#54 Gaz says:Oh and just stick pressable a scroll wheel on the side of the phone (SonyEricsson P90 style) for library navigation.
#55 Bubba TBone says:LOL, yeah lets use a cell phone to play our music. Bye Bye battery life.
Look, Apple didn’t sabatoge this by putting a 100 limit on this device. Um iPod 512 shuffle? Do these not get sold because of the song limit? No. Nano kill these? No.
Facts.
(1) Price is to expensive for halfwit, ugly, bricklike phone.
(2) Design wise its about as attractive as a wheelbarrow full of cracked cinderblocks and frog manure.
(3) It’s like carrying a brick around. Clunky.
(4) Poor marketing
(5) If it held 1,000 songs it still wouldn’t sell because its about as fashionable as you grandmother’s leotards.
(6) Razor will do better depending on price and promotional marketing.
(7) Motorola should let apple design the phone and do the marketing.
(8) I don’t think Motorola is so stupid in business that they would let someone take this much advantage of them as implied in this article. I think Motorola is trying to get better licensing arrangements from apple so when they do put it on a phone such as the razor they wouldn’t have to pay as much becuase they could cite the fact that the Rokr was such a failure.
(9) Conspiracy theory….ooh Apple next move
iToilet. Every time you flush it picks a random song from your playlist and you get your own refreshing music to cover up the noise of the toilet flushing.
LOL
PS: Comparing APPLE to MSFT is like comparing a scientist to a serial rapist.
If it was MSFT it wouldn’t be iPod it would be
iOWNU
#56 marek says:ROKR can only support up to 512MB memory card so if you upload about 100 full time songs aprox. 3-5 min it will much less take all the memory, or you will have around 100MB additional mem. for video. Is that such a bad thing.
Everybody’s complaining about the 100 songs limit but in reality it’s close to memory limitations of the phone.
Leave a reply