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Why the Rokr Phone Is An Important Failure
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian has some interesting commentary on the new iPod cellphone." From the article: "The music-player module works like an iPod - though it lacks the clickwheel that makes its big brothers function so slickly. But overall, the impression is distinctly underwhelming. The word on the streets is that far from being the revolutionary device that will bring about media 'convergence', the Rokr is, well, just the sum of its parts. And that, it seems to me, is the most interesting thing about it."
The problem with that is that the Mighty Mouse hasn't really been all that welcomed, in part due to certian features of its surface sensitivity. Also, remember that the Rokr isn't an Apple PRODUCT, per se, it just happens to have iTunes connectivity. It's a Motorola product, and while Apple and Motorola have a long history of working together, Apple isn't going to let Motorola control their phone designs.
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
I thought that when I saw the 512 MB - 1GB capactity...whatever the "100 songs" was supposed to be.
I always cringe when they state the number of songs. While it's always easier that way for consumers to understand, I am thinking: "hmmm...100 songs at 96kbps AAC?"
No thank you!
JB
and ignore all of that, make some minor modifications to the industrial design hellhole that are the mobile phones of today, and still try to tell people it's an ipod.
that, to me, is what's wrong with the Rokr.
1) Apple comes out with a phone.
2) It plays music and is a phone.
3) Millions of fashionable heat-seekers buy it.
4) Apple gets to sell songs and ring-tones, which is, inexplicably, something like a 347 billion dollar a year business worldwide (go figure).
5) Apple makes a lot of money.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
big business has ruined what could have otherwised been a great product. And why is that? DRM, restrictions, and feature lockout.
Can't use the songs as ring tones? Just to appease the cell phone companies? Do cellphone companies really think they can continue to make money on a gimmick forever? Where's the creativity?
How could apple fix this? The same way they do with all there products. Control the entire thing. I don't think partnering really works for Apple. They should have developed the phone themselves from scratch, maybe with a minor partner, not someone like Motorola. Furthermore, what if they could offer their own cellphone service and make something like downloadable songs over the wireless network feasible? I guess the problem with that is that Apple does not own such a network. I think Apple should give the iPhone another chance, and do it right.
Seriously this device is sweet. With pocketmusic player, it makes a good mp3 player (they have a winamp skin); you can put an SD card in it (right now I just have 1 gig), which although doesn't match ipod storage, is enough to convince me to not carry three devices around (ipod, PDA, phone). Betaplayer (now called something else) makes a great divx player (and is free). So I can watch movies, listen to mp3s, have a full functioning PDA, and a nice phone. It's much more bulky than an ipod, but it beats having to carry three devices around.
Didn't we all learn that it is never a winning strategy for companies to hide beneficial technology? For example, one often hears conspiracy theories that GM could make a car that gets a zillion MPG, but big oil pays them to keep it in the dark. About three minutes of economics refutes this, by demonstrating that GM could make more selling the advanced cars than big oil would be willing to pay.
The same holds true for the iPod phone. Whatever the reason for its lack of certain features, it is clearly not to protect other companies, or even other divisions within Apple. If these features could be included at a competitive price, Apple would make more money by including them than it would lose elsewhere. Despite the looney theories, any MBA and Apple executive would know this.
[sorry about the unfinished post]
Look at the nano, it's got such tiny flash chips which are huge storage-wise.
Storage size isn't the problem. There's no shortage of phones with a lot more than the 100 song capability of this one - including the Rockr. Note that Apple actually limits the capability to 100 songs, no matter how much memory you have.
Which to me basically says that Apple does not want a phone with music capability to succeed, and this device is deliberately underwhelming, and an attempt to deflect that trend for a while. It goes under the assumption that people will want to choose an Apple device, and faced with a bad phone, they will choose an Ipod instead.
I think that is a mistake. I use mhy phone as text reader and radio already, and I'd really hate going back to carry a separate device for that. I don't know what mp3 player will be my next one, but I do know it will be labeled as a telephone.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
1) Apple partners with Motorola to come out with a phone.
2) It plays music and is a phone.
3) Nobody buys it, because...
4) Apple sells the songs via your PC, not directly to the phone, and Motorola still sells you the ringtones separately.
5) Nobody makes any money.
It's like AOL/Time Warner all over again...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I see the ROKR as proof that Apple has become much more adept at business strategy than it was back in the 1990s. People have been screaming for a hybrid phone/iPod for some time now, and Apple has given them what they want. They haven't placed a huge bet on it, and they're letting Motorola do the heavy lifting (which is a long time coming). I say smart move Apple.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The article may be right about the 100-song limitation being Apple's fault, but all the other design flaws of the Rokr...
Makes me wonder why they didn't slap a nano on the back of a razr. I mean, 2 Gig nano($150) + Razr ($200) = $350. I understand that it's a little more involed, but shit...slap a calender with email and you got a nice little product. Even if you have to download via the interweb and FireWire them over.
The opposite of progress is congress
Apple partnered with Motorola not because they think Motorola can design a better phone or a better interface, but actually to insulate themselves from a horrible failure, should that happen.
Apple will probably make its own cellphones eventually, but right now the conservative decision (and the correct decision) would be to go with someone who is already in the phone business, see how the product does, see what its flaws are, then improve with its own Shiny Apple iPodPhone.
I had a chance to play with the ROKR at a Cingular store in Tampa, FL, over the weekend, and the music feature, even with "surround stereo," was not enough to want to switch from my Nokia 6620 (which still has an old AT&T Wireless plan and unlimited mMode). It's a nice phone overall, well-designed, sounds good, but I've never liked Motorola's GUI on any of their phones (except for the MPx200 that I had for a while, but then that was Windows SmartPhone, and signal quality was awful). Nokia still has the market on intelligent UI design with SymbianOS.
As for me, I can get pretty much the same functionality with a 512 MB MMC card, OggPlay for SymbianOS, and a couple of scripts to transfer a playlist to my phone and rename them from *.m4a to *.mp4 so OggPlay can find them. Oh, and a stereo headset that sounds just as good as an iPod's. For the extra time it takes I get back a very nice UI.
Steven Buehler | swbuehler@gmail.com
No, your comment doesn't make any sense.
The Motorola phone doesn't run anything that looks or works like iTunes. It's an "iTunes phone" because you can sync your music to it from iTunes.
The phone should be considered an "iPod phone" for all intents and purposes, but Apple didn't want to dilute the "iPod" brand for something so clunky.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
It is not an iPod.
It is not designed, marketed, or sold as such.
It is a Motorola phone, that has iTunes.
It's not even designed by Apple for christ-sake. Steve Jobs called it "pretty cool". No RDF to be seen in action.
The chief purpose of this phone is to be there before anyone else, license the iTunes software and patent rights (common, does no-one except me remember the iPod patent with an antenna on the side?), and establish Apple as jointly the first to market.
The real news was the iPod Nano. Now quit bitching. And remember, if it's successful, there will be more to come (but not for awhile).
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
I think you need to reconsider your views of the origin of (at the least) OS X. Sure, it's based on UNIX, which Apple likes to use as a marketing point, but saying that Apple was merely 'going with the UNIX flow' is rather offbase.
Apple had originally intended to move to an internally developed next-generation OS in the mid-late nineties. You may have heard of it - its codename was Copland. It was one of the greatest software development disasters in recent memory. It repeatedly missed milestones, and Apple eventually decided the project was too ambitious and gave it the axe. At that point, Apple went shopping for a new OS. They looked at any number of candidates, but the two strongest suitors ended up being BeOS and NeXTStep.
Keep in mind, NeXTStep had been around since the mid-to-late 80's, so it was a fairly mature system by that point. It's certainly possible the UNIX underpinnings had some effect on Apple's final decision, but it seems far more likely the relative maturity of NeXT relative to Be and Steve Jobs had a greater effect than the underlying system.
Remember that Apple had stayed afloat at this point solely due to its loyal fanbase. I rather doubt UNIX fanboyism (even rarer then as this all hapened before Linux really started to gain wind in the mainstream) played much into Apple's decision.
The point of all this? Betting on NeXT was a life-or-death decision for Apple. Far from going with any flow, it was a radical shift in architechture that had to result in either success or the failure of the company. Apple's failed attempt at a modern OS with Copland had cost the company literally millions. They quite simply couldn't afford to ahve that happen a second time. Neither could they sit and do nothing as MacOS was already technically hobbled by the mid-90's.
Dismissing the evolution of NeXT into Rhapsody and eventually OS X as being a path of least resistance indicates a lack of familiarity with the actual gravity of the move at the time. It was a huge risk that paid off in the long run. The iPod may be another story - less risky, but still took a to that point niche market with mediocre at best sales and turning it into a phenomenally successful mainstream one indicates they did *SOMETHING* other than go with the flow. What that was is left as an excercise to the reader.
None of this is meant to defend to ROKR. Everything I've seen seems to indicate that Apple doesn't really care about it on any real level. But choosing the original iPod and OS X as examples of Apple being unwilling to take risks seems a bit ludicrous to me.
It's always sad when a better, more robust technology gets overridden by something less capable due to marketing and back-door corporate alliances. Granted, USB2.0 is good, and for most people it's enough. It's just not as good as the same generation firewire.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward