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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 article mentioned Rokr lacks the clickwheel that makes its big brothers function so slickly.
I wonder if Apple is able to pull such a trick where it uses its Mighty Mouse technology to provide both keypad and clickwheel on the same surface. Icons/numbers will be displayed accordingly through this LCD-type surface.
Now that will not only change the way we interact with mobile phones. For example, on game-playing mode, this Mighty-Panel will switch to a gamepad; On net-browsing mode, it offers scrollbars, back/forward buttons.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
A phone based on Al Roker was destined to be a failure anyway.
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
Is something users are ready for but technology is not. Why must we continue to integrate multiple technologies in really shitty ways? Just wait 5 years for technology to catch up and things will be a lot better. There's already proof Apple should have waited. Look at the nano, it's got such tiny flash chips which are huge storage-wise. Wouldn't it have made sense to wait just a little while longer and put those in the ROKR? Yes, I know that technologies have to come out at some point, and that someone has to be an early player, but perhaps these players are a bit too early.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
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.
Not to mention that having an MP3 player and a cell phone sharing the same battery is a stupid idea.
This is one of those 'high concept' ideas that may have looked good on paper but will not connect with consumers.
But that's not the way it works: instead, you have to connect the phone to your computer (using a slow USB connection) and get songs from your iTunes music library - just as you do with a conventional iPod.
Strange, I seem to get about 3KB/sec most of the time off Cingular's network here in Maryland. I really don't see the benefit in downloading 4MB files off Cingular's network, especially if you don't have the unlimited data plan. What's USB 1.0 rated at? Over 1 MB/sec? That seems to be about 300x as fast as downloading off the phone network.
Granted, it's not as portable for downloading files, but is it really worth waiting half an hour for downloading a song where there isn't EDGE or EVDO? (I haven't yet found a place where I get "EDGE" speeds in the Baltimore area).
Apple has no patent on innovation itself.
Yeah, that doesn't get reviewed for another month or two.
I think the most important part of the ROKR being so underwhelming is that it looks like steve didn't even try. It was introduced, it left the stage, and was promptly forgotten.
Steve is a master marketer if nothing else, and there's no way he wouldn't have known the iPod nano presentation would utterly eclipse it. The question I ask is why so much in the way of underwhelming promotion from Apple themselves? So many people online (and I realise this isn't an ultimate metric of possible popularity) have clamoured for an iTunes phone, hoping for a brilliant interface, ipod-style design, a phone they could really enjoy using as something different.
For steve to accept something like the ROKR makes me suspect he has a point to make, but I'm not sure just what it is yet.
Ten Thousand Free Adult Desktops
Something like this won't truly get recognized until it "does it all." A phone-plus-MP3 player is just that, as the article says. It's not a revolution. It's about as much of a revolution as a PDA-plus-MP3 player is.
I don't think that a product will get recognized unless it does everything the user wants. It's gotta be a PDA-plus-phone-plus-MP3 player. Make it as cool-looking as the iPod, and then *everyone* will want it. Maybe throw in movies just for effect.
...master of none. You'd probably have more space for flash storage if they had forgone the camera or the bluetooth connectivity. Either you have lower less capable modules or it's put together rather cheaply...one reason I avoid mp3 players with voice recording and FM playback shoehorned on.
But this will get better as stuff gets more and more minaturized. In 5 years we might have phones with five megapixel cameras and 20 gigs of storage. I also wonder how the U.S. phone industry will criple them.
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
Of course the iTunes mobile phone is limited. Steve Jobs knows what he's doing, and wants to dip his foot into the water of mobile phone music players without cannibalizing the iPod sales. He was less than enthusiastic about the phone - calling it "pretty cool", rather than his usual over-the-top evangelizing, and he looked a bit uncomfortable when using it. He made it pretty clear that this is a Motorola phone with some Apple software, and not an Apple product. The artificial 100-song limit adds to the feeling that this is a plan to get a limited presence in the mobile market, without Apple committing themselves wholeheartedly.
The iPod nano was the real star of the show. If I was from Motorola, I'd be a little annoyed that Apple upstaged the ROKR with the nano. The message seemed to be: "If you want to have music on your phone, here's a decent option, but why would you, when there is a tiny device like the iPod nano that will fit in your pocket with a normal phone, and is better in every way".
Sure this is an important phone cause of iTunes, but I already have a phone that does everything this does and more in a smaller form factor and have had it for a year. (The Audiovox SMT5600) Sure you might groan that it runs windows mobile, but it actually runs really really well. I stuck a 512M miniSD card and walk around with 200 songs on it in full mp3 stereo. So the capabilities of the phone are really just old news cept for iTunes.
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.
Quite the contrare. Many faliures, although failures, pave the way for other things. The Apple Lisa was a failure due to price, but look at computers today.... all based on those concepts such as GUI's, icons, windows, etc. It is really hard to say if a product is a *failure* because it might lead to bigger and better things. In the middle ages, there was a process that used material and lighting to etch a pattern onto the material. such a process was said to create the Shroud of Turin by skeptics. Although it was not popular because it was a lengthy process, its general idea led to photography. this phone may lead to the next big craze.
The article may be right about the 100-song limitation being Apple's fault, but all the other design flaws of the Rokr are the fault of Motorola and/or cell carriers, not Apple.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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.
You missed the point of TFA. The failure is not in the technology because I'm sure convergence is technically possible. The failure to the consumer is in the business decisions to not allow the iPhone to cannibalize existing lucratice revenue streams, and therefore there's no media integration/convergence.
In fact you need to be interested in this article. It makes a really keen obversation about Apple; that Apple is too scared to damage itself in order to imporve itself. This implies that Apple viewes itself and its current business posture as weak, and thus must do everytihing in its power to keep the status quo. Look at its move towards Intel chips for its next generation hardware; they realize that Intel is the status quo and they are putting themselves in that stream. It takes effort and cunning to successfully be different, and Apple is now showing a reluctance to do just that.
There will be another company that will build the next iPhone, but they will do it better because of the failure of the iPhone; they will learn from mistakes. The point to be gleamed from this is that in fact it will NOT be Apple.
And why would Steve Jobs try? How much money does Apple make from a ROKR versus a Nano or even a Shuffle? I thinking it's either $0, or close to it. The whole thing is probably just an experiment to see what the wireless providers would let them get away with.
For steve to accept something like the ROKR makes me suspect he has a point to make, but I'm not sure just what it is yet.
"Buy iPods, not Phones".
Which will work for a while, but eventually (1-2 years) phones will have 4-8GB of flash, wireless transfer, and a 'good enough' UI. And then it is bye-bye for the lowend music player market. Just expect Apple to do as little as possible to help this along.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
[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.
Isn't it a little premature to call Rokr a failure? I mean, sure, it wasn't the Apple-designed mana-from-heaven iPod phone many wanted, but other than that, what's so bad about it?
I ordered one yesterday at the Gold Coast Cingular store in Chicago (about two blocks from the Apple North Michigan Ave store) - one guy was already in there playing with the one demo model, and right after I walked in, two people walked "wanting to see the Rokr". From the looks of it, Cingular is special ordering all these, or at the least, can't keep them in stock in stores just yet.
Remember iPod mini's debut? Who would pay just $50 less for a mini iPod that had (at the time) 16GB less space? Or what about the iPod itself? $299 was just too much for a 5GB MP3 player. Yet both flew off the shelves, each at their own pace, but both were doubted at their beginning.
I wanted a new phone, with Bluetooth to use my Prius' hands-free system and the ability to use at least some of my iTMS songs on it. So I can't load my entire 6.5 GB music library, but my main playlist only has 80-90 songs, big deal. It doesn't look like an iPod, but quite frankly, I'm glad. Phones are primarily for making calls, and I like to use numbers to call people, not swing a clickwheel around to rotary dial - why should there have to be a clickwheel on the phone when I know of no one today that would prefer a rotary dial over touch-tone phone.
Let's wait at least until mid-week to decide if this was a failure - iTunes Japan surprised everyone in just a week, and most of the buzz has been about the nano all this week (which absolutely rocks, but is too expensive to just replace my iPod as my car's jukebox). If sales numbers are where I think they might be, this "failure" might surprise everyone just like the last two mispriced, misplaced Apple pieces.
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"
The article mentions how the ROKR doesn't do what it should, because Apple, Motorola, and Cingular all have their own existing businesses that they don't want to see get bypassed by new technology.
I saw a picture of the ROKR on the web, and the menu looks exactly like the existing menus on my Motorola phone. I was expecting the famous Chicago font that you see on old classic Macs, and iPods nowadays. But its just the crap font used in Motorola phones. Also there's the input situation with no click wheel type of thing (or even an iPod Shuffle kind of interface)... the ROKR looks just like a standard issue cellphone, that has "iTunes" added as an extra application to the system, along with the calculator, mini browser, address book, and a java game.
The obvious thing to do would be for Apple to make the phone entirely themselves. I suppose it's possible since they ARE also a hardware company. Frankly, I'm surprised Apple allowed another company to have so much control in designing something that would be associated with the Apple brand. It doesn't end up having the Apple look or feel at all.
Apple could even launch their own cellphone service, instead of pairing with Cingular. They wouldn't even need to build their own network. Virgin Mobile is just re-branded Sprint service. So I suppose Apple could do something similar with an existing cellphone company... Offering an Apple phone to use on Apple's cellphone network.
Perhaps then Apple could truly innovate on this thing, instead of falling victim to the situation the article describes when multiple businesses try to cooperate.
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
Apple doesn't own the towers. He who operates the cellular networks has a fair bit of say over what phones get service.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Well, for me they aren't. I had a Nokia 3650, and regardless of form-factor oddness the interface was just dubious. Very slow, took ages and many button-presses to just get it to understand I wanted to send a text. Something like Phone book->Pick name->confirm number->create message->SMS message (as opposed to picture or what have you. Or there was another way starting from Create Message that required just as many button presses before you started typing.
I switched to the Motorola V3 to give something else a try - specifically to get away from the Nokia interfaces. The Motorola interface has proven better in some areas, the same in others. Not worse in any, except the god-awful default ringtone.
It's still not great however. Years ago, I had an Ericsson T38, and that had a great interface. Purely text-based, to create a message was just one option at the top level - 'New Message'. If you regularly sent to one person (which I did - my then-girlfriend-now-wife), you could specify person as being the default recipient. So creating an SMS consisted of three button presses - cursor down, select 'New Message', hit select to confirm default recipient and then type. And the response was instance - none of the large lag that seems increasingly common with graphically flash phones.
There's not one of the new phones I've found that's anywhere near as quick as that. I like the V3 as a phone for its size, audio quality and size of keypad. I can't help feeling that in some of the basics however phone interfaces going backwards fast.
Cheers,
Ian
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
Cingular still makes boku money, just like they always have. And Motorola still makes whatever money they always have. So the phone isn't a failure at all. But it's nothing like the spectacular success that iPod was either. What do you expect from two huge companies who are trying to hang on to their revenue streams?
it's hilarious - the same networks that spout endless marketing babble about the features that are offered on their new phones, but these are the same networks that charge ridiculous bandwidth prices (often by the kb transfered) for using their networks.
there are endless studies with cel providers complaining that no one surfs the net on their phones, no one plays games on their phones - and this is exactly why.
who's going to bother surfing the net - unless it's an absolute emergency - when you are being billed by the kb?
this is why wap is such a collosal waste of time to develop for - when people are being milked money for every extra character that you have on your webpage, how are you supposed to provide ANY kind of 'rich media experience' for these customers?
we are just finishing off a celphone game for a large publisher that is just entering the mobile market - and it's a ridiculous market to try and enter into, both from a developer and a consumer perspective.
i'm not even going to get into the nightmare of developing games for celphones - you hear all these reports of millions of dollars being invested into mobile game development - and the platform is so fragmented and flat-out broken that it's a complete waste of time to get into.
it's the dot com bubble except a thousand times worse...except that when the bubble 'pops' it will only be good for consumers.
first the celphone providers forced you to ONLY use the ringtones that they provide you and threatened with lawsuits any company that dared to break that monopoly.
second the celphone providers try to force unwanted features onto consumers with new phones - which helps as far as 'market penetration' goes - but the overall impact has still be next to negligible simply because of all of the 'hidden costs' to the consumer - namely airtime.
the cost to download a 3 meg MP3 (or whatever format itunes spits songs out in) over the celphone networks would be easily 5-10 times what itunes itself charges for their songs.
so instead of a 99 cent song, you suddenly have 5+ dollars PER SONG in order to transfer the songs to your phone.
the better solution is providing integrated wifi into the ipod-type phones - then when the phone is near a wifi spot, it can just access the 'normal' internet much like a windowsCE PDA device (for example).
As hotspots continue to popup everywhere, this kind of solution would definitely be a huge boost to the consumer experience.
Gekido's Lair
I thought the phone was interesting, but not interesting to me. I immediately noticed on the specs that it supported bluetooth specifically only for voice.
I can't tell you how many people I know can't get their laptops to sync to their bluetooth phones in the one way they want them to: to be able to connect to the net
Why can't they sell a phone specifically for this market? All it would do is make phone calls, and wirelessly connect your laptop to some dialup speed connection. No bloody video camera, no lame on phone email thing, no songs, no extra ring tones... just easy net capability. I guess that would just be too obvious, and never sell well in Japan.
The Admin and the Engineer
When you purchase the licence (yes, you only ever purchase a licence) to music it comes with certain restrictions. One of the standard restrictions is over public playing. You are not granted the right to play the music in public places. I suspect that one of the main reasons that the iPhone doesn't let you use itms songs as ringtones is it is against the licence. In many ways drm doesn't reduce your rights, it just enforces the limitations more carefully.
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.
Did it really say that Apple is entrenched with its iPod line and won't make changes near the end? In an article about a phone that was colaunched with the iPod nano that completely replaced the top selling iPod mini line?
ROKR will not be a 'hit', but there are enough people out there who will be tempted by the device. It'll make its money back, and hopefully Motorola will let Apple design the next phone.
When it's a CDMA carrier (like Sprint - my carrier).
FWIW, Sprint's the only CDMA carrier that doesn't allow outside phones on their network - Verizon can be coaxed into taking an unlocked Sprint or Alltel phone, and Alltel WILL take an unlocked Sprint or Verizon phone.
Now, GSM carriers? Just drop a SIM card in. Get a quad-band GSM phone from the UK, and throw a Cingular or T-Mobile SIM in, and it'll work in the US no problem.
Your knowledge of copyright law is grossly wrong. The copyright statute itself (you don't need to find court cases or federal regulations) sets out exceptions to the public performance monopolies, and a cellphone ringtone would fall squarely within it. One of the exceptions (there are several -- for church worship, etc.) is that a stereo no more powerful than a typical home stereo is acceptable, and we'd all agree that describes a cell phone speaker. A problem you didn't mention is that in documentary filmmaking, ringtones now need to be "cleared" while previously a telephone ringing did not. The reason isn't what you expect. It's not that documentary filmmakers are worried about losing a lawsuit and paying huge damages, it's that the film distributors won't touch a film if their lawyers see any potential liability. A documentary filmmaker (except for a few like Michael Moore) is likely to be flat broke and not be worth suing, but the distributors have deep, deep pockets and they don't want any liability.
The filmmaking problem comes not from the public performance right of a cell phone, but making a derivative work (the movie) and showing that in theaters (the public performance). The issue of whether the standard copyright defenses (fair use, implied license, first sale, etc.) apply simply doesn't come up.
With great power comes great fan noise.
Please, please, no WiFi on cell phones. I keep hearing people asking for this feature but IMHO it's a waste of time, for a couple of reasons:
1) It will add unnecessary bulk to your phone.
2) It will use more battery than the cell network
3) It reduces motivation for greater investment in true cellular mobile data networks
I've been using a 3rd generation cell phone for 2 years now. In that time, data costs have come down from 4c/KB to 0.1c/KB, and with my 100MB cap, the rate is effectively 0.03c/KB. The speed is consistently very fast - not quite wifi, but still at 250kb/s, quite comparable with ADSL. And you don't need to find a hotspot. I even surfed the net from the CBD to the airport (30km) at speed without a single dropout. Surely that's cooler than WiFi.
So, in summary - WiFi enabling a cell phone is a WOFTAM!
Apple is just milking it like they did with HP. It's going to fail, Apple will make some money, and their brand nonetheless won't get tarnished.
Convergence sounds so logical when you put it into a business plan. It sounds so great when you ask people if it's what they want. "Do you want one device that cooks your meals, washes the dishes AND entertains you while you eat?" Sure, they say. In the real world, though, convergence devices almost never work in the long run.
I used to believe the convergence myth just as much as the next guy, but a marketing guru by the name of Al Ries convinced me otherwise. If you'd like to see his take on why convergence isn't going to happen, go to this page and click on, "The Convergence Bubble."
http://www.ries.com/Articles/index.cfm?Page=adage
I sent this e-mail to the author of the article. I think he missed the point.
John,
I think you are missing a few of the points of the phone. First off this is
not a phone built by Apple. This is a phone built by Motorola with some
software by Apple thrown in. This is not an iPod. This device is not as
cool as an iPod and a such was named otherwise. This was not to dilute the
iPod brand. However this is an expansion of the iTunes brand.
Previously you were only able to play FairPlay songs on either iTunes or an
iPod. This is the next major expansion of the iTunes brand. The first
major expansion was expanding iTunes to Windows. The second major expansion
was to build the online store. There were several evolutionary expansions
with more international stores but these were of lesser importance. The
ROKR is the expansion of iTunes and FairPlay to other devices. This is a
big deal for Apple to licensing out it's technology at all, even if it is a
partner. This is also a big deal for Motorola to be working with Apple
again after their previous licensing debacle.
At some point probably next year a new much bigger expansion of the iTunes
phone will probably happen, possibly to other device manufacturers that may
blow your mind.
On your other points. Do you really think that Cell phone users want to
download music at today's data rates for cellular networks. Unless you feel
like dropping $99/month for unlimited download access and whatever else the
cell phone companies would like per song to buy music. So let's look at the
breakdown of the money from the purchase of a song on iTunes. I think I
read that the labels get $0.71 per song leaving Apple with about $0.28 per
song. So now Cingular wants their share for using their network to get the
music. Over the internet you are already paying your share for your access
to the internet. You will end up paying to download music as well as paying
for your music. Whether it is your $20-40/month for broadband (you get the
other benefits of the internet as well) or the $1/song for Cingular to
download the track. Now let's add another $1 so each song and cost twice as
much. Let's see, do you work for Napster. Are you trying to help the
labels distribute the wealth to a number of online retailers that are not
being supported by the consumer. Think about how long it will take to
download that song at approximately the 90kbps that is at the upper edge of
the Cingular data networks' speed. On to your USB point, let's come back to
reality USB2 while more limited than firewire is certainly faster than any
Cellular network EDGE or otherwise.
Look at this device as it is meant to be. A first generation iTunes phone.
Their will be more. Their will be a lot of focus group research. And they
will figure things out. Look at this move as it is meant to be. Other
manufactures devices able to play FairPlay songs. Long for iTunes
convergence on other devices. Maybe not this year, but if it pulls in a 33%
margin Apple will sell it.
I personally am glad that Apple had the cajones to stand up to Cingular and
the other cellular networks and recognize that in the same way people don't
want to rent music, people also don't want to pay a retailer, wholesaler,
distributor, and producer of the music as well. Let's cut out all of the
middle-men.
Overall I agreed with much of your article, but I can't help but think you
missed the big picture.
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
Convergence devices are, in the words of (I believe) Peter Rojas, a single concentrated point of failure. Right now, if my MP3 player breaks, I send it off to get repaired, and I'm deprived of the use of my MP3 player for a while.
When my convergence MP3 player/cell phone/camera/video recorder/Tivo/PDA breaks, I lose pretty much everything.
Also, with a convergence device, if want to upgrade one part, I have to upgrade/change everything. The new device might have a better MP3 player, but a worse PDA OS. With separate devices, you just upgrade the functions you want.
It looks exactly like the e398 i have had for 6 months. The only difference appears to be an itunes button and an itunes application.
The only groundbreaking idea about this product is that motorola and apple have the audacity to rebadge an old product and sell it.
They're selling the phone through Cingular.
Cingular charges $20/month for unlimited bandwidth on your phone.
I'm using a Motorola v551 w/bluetooth to my iBook right now to post this.
The article is right in its premise that the ROKR is crippled because a real iPhone threatens existing core business. But not Apple's: they don't make that much money from iTunes (maybe 4% of revenue, probably much less). No, the threatened companies are, you guessed it, the phone companies and the record labels. Every Slashdotter can guess how the labels are threatened, by every possible business model that isn't limited to conning content producers into giving away most of the value in their products, and reselling it on easily-controllable plastic discs. But the phone companies are the real problem here, as the article points out when it describes how a $1 Coldplay download costs $25 as ringtones.
Those ringtones are the most profitable (percentage yield) product the telcos sell. They didn't even really have any right to get any real take from them, but they did get their hands on the first generation of deals, when people were used to having a single ringtone for their whole lives, and didn't think hard about spending $1-3 to get it. Even if they already owned the song from which the ringtone is sampled, they could see it as a convenience fee for the sampling/installation process that put the sample into their ringer. The companies that originally offered the service fought the copyright holders, the record labels, for the chance to offer that service on existing content. And telcos backed the upstarts, in return for getting to do the charging. Now they make most of that money.
Back in the Spring, when Motorola was getting hassled by developers to whom it had announced availability of this ROKR phone, one of their VPs blurted out at a conference that the telcos were blocking it. Verizon, he said, was addicted to getting $3 every time one of their customers got a music sample as a ringtone. Even though Verizon wouldn't be in the loop on a song downloaded from iTMS to one's PC, then synced with a ROKR that just happened to be sold to its user by Verizon, Verizon still wanted to get a cut every time one of their customers used a device that Verizon had sold them to get a song.
Apple, Motorola and Verizon/Sprint/Whoever spent 6 months negotiating, and finally the ROKR is out. I believe that the real deal has been cut behind the scenes, to cut Verizon in on the real iPhone. That phone will let the iPod half actually download songs over the phone half's Internet (radio) connection. Which will allow Verizon to justify getting a cut of the revenue. Maybe Apple got Verizon to fight with the labels over who controls delivery of those copyrighted songs. Maybe it somehow leverages whatever license Verizon gets from the labels to do ringtones. Maybe it's got some kind of DRM that expires old songs - like the current ROKR's 100 song limit, which will discard many songs, many of which will be repurchased.
I expect this is all leading towards Verizon charging users every time we listen to a song, regardless of how it's delivered, or what we "bought". The simplicity of packaging creates a black box, and most consumers (especially in this exploding market of less sophisticated users) won't even realize that there's little justification for charging them so often for the same thing "under the hood".
The ROKR is the thin edge of the wedge. It's just songs now. Within 2 years it will be videos, then all multimedia content. It will all be funneled through these "phones", not necessarily because that's better for consumers, but because another little chunk of plastic that can be controlled by a "copyright controller" has finally been found to replace LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes and CDs/DVDs. If we thought getting screwed by record companies sucked, we'll be reminiscing about "the good old days" once the telcos are the new boss.
--
make install -not war
On my new Cingular phone, I tried out the web surfing just to see what it was like.
They built in a gopher-like menu system to help you navigate the internet.
Each menu has about 5 items to choose from, each item is ASCII text with no graphics. Each menu is apx 18kb.
I'll say that again just in case you blanked out...
Simple ASCII Menu of 5 items -> 18,000 bytes transfered.
They charge by the kb, so they pack shit into the stream.
yes... but that is not high-speed. For $5/month you can get unlimited data transfer over Sprint phones. Get vision service and have dial-up-networking dial #777. More Info At Sprintusers.com
-nick
https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/products/wireles s/whatiswap.cfm#cost
The following call charges apply for WAP GSM & CDMA Mobile calls*:
16.5 cents per 30 seconds for calls made in peak times.
8.25 cents per 30 seconds for calls made in off-peak times.+
All WAP calls will incur a 22 cent call connection fee.
This is what we get charged for GPRS, either PAYG or Subscription, it's outlandish, forget downloading a song! that'll cost you around $40 AU: http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/networks/info/gpr s.htm
There is no way in hell I will ever use gprs other than dire emergencies (so far, that's consisted of a scrabble argument and dictionary.com, once) I am never going to use GPRS until Telstra come to their senses.
I haven't looked into that iMode thing yet, which looks like yet ANOTHER subscription service, but knowing telstra, it will be overpriced and generally useless.
"Convergence is, and always has been, overrated. The trend is, and always has been, towards more categories of electronic devices, not fewer. The world is about divergence, not convergence."
Good gravy. I'm truely amazed at some of the 'black and white' attitudes around here. Convergance is not about destroying a category of device. Never was, never will be. (Seriously, if it were, you'd think there would be much stronger attempts.) Instead, it's about convenience. My cell phone, for example, has a crappy camera. But you know what? 640 by 480 is better than 0 by 0. Why? Because I don't have the pocket space to carry my digital camera around. The 'pda' in the phone, well it's lame. However, it's far better than the other non-existent PDA I own. At least it does keep track of contacts and alarms. Cool. Music player in a phone? Is it better than an iPod? Nope, it's better than no-iPod.
Why is cell phone convergance so attractive? For the simple reason that the phone is there all the time. Pay a few more bucks, get a few basic features. Okay, they're not top of the line features, but they're still useful. The phone becomes more valuable. This is a simple premise. No need to go all "it'll never replace the real thing!". That's not the point.
I really wish these rantings came with a small dose of common sense. All this uppitiness over attempts to make your cell phone more useful. Oh those bastards.
"Derp de derp."
Just out of curiosity ... how do you manage to use the Motorola cellphone as a modem to connect to the internet? I thought this feature was broken or unavailable on Motorola phones currently? Or required USB?
I'd be very interested in doing the same thing -- using my Motorola phone + Bluetooth to access the internet when mobile from my laptop.
I have ZERO interest in using the internet from my actual cellphone display. But using it as a bridge between my computer and the internet when I'm out of range of WiFi, that has some appeal.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
go to this page and click on, "The Convergence Bubble."
http://www.ries.com/Articles/index.cfm?Page=adage
This brings up a pop-up window that is set at 120-point width, in huge text. I am not going to read through a long article in a huge font in a little bitty pop-up window 120 pixels wide. I am not going to bother to change my settings to fix this, much less edit the raw HTML. Ain't that important to read this guy, whatever he has to say, if he can't present his content in a palatable form. Whatever else this guy has going for him, a user interace guru he is not.
There is no feature that makes this a better music phone than any other on the market. The software introduces no new features, does not have a better interface (software or hardware wise) other than playing protected AAC files from the iTMS, and the phone doesn't even look that great. If this is a success, it will be because of the iTunes name alone.
And it isn't even because Motorola or Apple are incompetent. Looking at the iPod nano and the Motorola RAZR phones, you can tell what the good design teams were doing at the time. It could have been so much more, but hopefully this is just a test of things to come.
For what it's worth (and I'm not saying it's much) here's what I think will happen:
Apple will eventually come out with an iPod that integrates a cell phone chip set. I don't mean a cell phone that also functions as an iPod, I mean the vice versa. Gone will be the speaker and mouthpiece, an archaic throwback to the cell phone's ancestral roots as a telephone. In its place will be in-ear buds (like the ones they sell now which also have an integrated mic (this is old technology). The form factor will be the same, it will just happen to make and take calls. There will be no number keys. (For the odd time when you actually dial something not already in the phone, you'll just have to scroll around to get the numbers using the scroll wheel.) Maybe they'll add a camera, if they can manage it without destroying the form.
I'd love to be listening to music on my walk to school, and then hear the music dim and the iPod's synthesized voice announce the caller's name. If I answer it by hitting the center button, the music is paused until the conversation is done. Otherwise the music keeps playing, maybe only to be briefly interupted for me to be told of a voicemail. The iPod is an audio device, and it wouldn't be a stretch to make it a two-way audio device without mucking with the nice design of it.
I know this sounds far fetched, but I'd buy such a device in a heartbeat. I'm sick of carrying around a bunch of devices, and between my cell phone and iPod, I wish the former would go away, not the latter.
Cue the smarm with a link to some clever hacker's rotary cell phone.
Okay.
I guess since the W800i is a GSM phone without the 850MHz band, it isn't sold much in the US. But rest assured in GSM countries the ROKR looks like the piece of crap it is, a Motorola E398 with an extra button.
(Though personally I'm holding out for the Samsung D600 instead of the W800i.)
A quick search on google gave me this: How To Use Your GSM Cell Phone as a Bluetooth Modem on Mac OS X and another hint.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I know what you mean. I just developed a live GPS Fleet-Tracking software package for Google Earth. IMO, it kicks ass mostly because it does everything it can to stay within data plan limits, and manages to squeeze a month's worth of 14-hour driving days into the 5MB the carrier provides with a 5-second polling interval. It took a week to devise and implement a custom, UDP-based protocol to save the TCP/IP overhead, and I spent even more weeks testing and tweaking to get the data usage down.
NEXTEL, who is the carrier for the phones it runs on, charges $20 per month for 5MB of data. Think about that. That's not even ONE mp3 file sometimes! It's $4 per megabyte (roughly 1 minute of song time)!! If you go over that amount, it's TEN DOLLARS per MB. Not exactly the environment for a rich media experience, is it? It's not even a good environment for business apps.
Who's gonna care about applications they can't afford to deploy or use?
--Jasin NataelTrue science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
I recently bought a Sony W800 phone. Wow, all I can say is great sound, easy enough to get my music on there, menus very similar to iPod and easy enough for a phone to play music, great camera with LED flash, and even the speaker does not sound that bad in worse case scenario no headphones. Also, the phone allows any MP3 to be a ringtone or message tone. Fast menus, not quite as intuitive as Nokia but much better than Motorola V3, etc.
Sony did a great job here. Not sure why there is no "buzz" around the phone. Only drawback is it looks like a toy phone with the silly white / metallic orange only case option. Great screen though. And memory stick can provide storage expansion, it came with 512K which is pretty good to start.
Another drawback, can't seem to transfer files over bluetooth, need to use USB cable for that.........
And yes, they do have "store" interface but have not figured out how to use it yet!
Real men don't need signitures!!!
PC Mag actually did that in their review of the ROKR. Check out the pictures here.
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
upto 512 mb of expandable memory?? any nokia symbian could do better than that...i have my 6670 expanded to 2gb and have installed a quality audio manager s/w..which makes it a lot better than the rokr... why would apple make such a mistake? common steve..even my granny can do better than this...
that sort of customer-abuse is fairly typical with verizon (the 'get it now' variety of shackles and chains), but cingular hasn't been known for it.
until apple and motorola stumbled through the door with this absurd monstrosity, cingular's flagship mp3 phone was the nokia 6230, which will accommodate up to a gigabyte of bog-standard SD flash memory (the slot's right under the battery), play mp3's without the ridiculous DRM lockdown, and exchange data freely over bluetooth with any OS that will listen.
i hope this isn't a sign that cingular is going down the lock-'em-in, bleed-'em-dry verizon road, but i suppose it won't ever be an issue for me. by the time my 6230 stops receiving calls and SMS'es, the "ROKR" will be as distant and quaint a memory as those first-gen parallel-port samsung YEPP players.
(which isn't to say I didn't get a good many hours of listening out of my parallel-port YEPP... :-)
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.
From reading that article, can anyone explain why this phone is significantly different to other phones that you can upload mp3s to and listen to them on the phone? A friend of mine had one of those at least two years ago, iirc.
Is it simply that it plays protected iTMS AAC files? The 'iTunes' on your phone doesn't seem that radical - I'm guessing (from pictures I've seen) that it's simply the hierarchical genre/artist/album UI of iTunes and not much else. (I'm not sure how necessary that is for 100 songs, of course, but presumably that will change over time).
Am I missing something? Is it just the DRM'd AAC support?
[1] From the Apple website.
[2] Whether it supports higher capacity cards will be discovered when someone makes TransFlash cards bigger than 512MB.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...then they might have produced something like this :
http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5944.html
Just for the record: you cannot thransfer songs to the iPod nano via Firewire. Sadly, transfers are USB only.
Isn't it a little premature to call Rokr a failure? I mean, sure, it wasn't the Apple-designed mana-from-heaven iPod phone many wanted, but other than that, what's so bad about it?
Well, I can think of three main things that make ipods desirable:
1) The user interface
The click wheel is reputedly excellent, and the shuffle's simplistic design makes it easy to operate without looking at.
2) The styling, which looks cool to others
Consider the picture of it. It looks nothing like an ipod and every bit like a generic mobile phone. It's not even white, so it probably doesn't come with ipod headphones.
With no ipod styling and no ipod headphones, you no longer have the 'ipod image'.
3) iTunes Music Store
Is pretty easy to use.
Well, this phone still has iTMS support, but it doesn't have the first two features. Perhaps there isn't anything "really bad" about it, but there's nothing really good about it either, if you ask me. To me it looks like a generic mobile phone with a generic MP3 player in it. And don't we already have them? It's hardly an idea that's hard to come up with...
Just my $0.02,
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
How about reading /. while in the driver's seat of the car?
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
Picked one of them up from the Cingular store on Saturday and returned it Sunday afternoon. While it's a nice concept, the execution left this Mac-head cold. Some observations: - Definitely an iTunes interface "bolted" into a standard Motorola phone - Being notified/interrupted by phone calls while listening to MP3s is a cool idea. I used this while riding my bike Sunday morning and it was quite handy. - The included headset is terrible. Sound quality though those earphones is poor and ruins the music experience. - I don't know if the phone is underpowered or what, but the screen-to-screen navigation through iTunes was very, very slow. - The phone requires all music to be converted to 128-Kbps AAC format. This is fine for music purchased on the iTunes Music Store, but not for high-bitrate MP3s. Anyway, I'd give it a 4 out of 10. I realized that I'm better off with my current cell phone and an iPod nano.
That sounds like a great idea. Give it a try and let me know how it works out.
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