Apple's Strategy Behind iTunes Mobile Phone

vishnu writes "CoolTechZone.com is running a story that analyzes Apple's strategy with ROKR. According to the author, the phone disappoints, but is this Apple's way of testing a potential market. Quote: "There was nothing wrong with the creative cells of the designers at Apple; ROKR is simply Jobs taking a calculated risk. He doesn't want a cell phone that doubles as an MP3 player to become too popular as that would cut straight into Apple's bread and butter product, the iPod. On the other hand, Jobs knows for a fact that in the future cell phones will play a huge role in portable digital music; therefore, he is hedging his bets. He wants to give people a taste of what is to come but at the same time, he wants to project phones as an extension but not a replacement of a portable music player. He's consequently hoping to discomfort Apple's competition with a cell phone that has nothing but iTunes going for it."

Comments

It's a Motorola product.

[jcr]

Apple's strategy here is to sell a program and a service to Motorola. It's not Apple's hardware, guys. The ROKR is not an Apple product.

-jcr

Re:Convergence devices

[pinkocommie]

I currently have the RAZR admittedly not a great phone but I was comparing the the upper flip part of the fone with the nano and both are about the same thickness and cover the same area (RAZR's flip top is wider but shorter). My point? If they can fit something to the same profile (nano) as half the RAZR i'm sure they could integrate a decent phone in the same sized package? Imagine a flip with the top being like an ipod nano and the bottom being the numeric keypad? Sounds pretty cool to me.
Also along the line of convergence most new subcompact digital camera's do a decent job of capturing 30 fps video (MJPEG / MPEG etc). Yes they dont compare with a video camera but the convenience alone is worth it. Give it another generation or two and I dont see most people (casual video makers) caring enough to buy two separate devices, this will eventually happen with cell phones as well.

The UNIX philosophy for mobile devices

[mrchaotica]

It's like the Unix philosophy. Each program does one thing and does it well. And it communicates well with other programs.

That's the kicker, isn't it? The trouble is that no mobile device just does one thing, and no mobile device communicates well with others.

Part of the problem is that hardware designers are approaching the problem from the wrong angle. Instead of thinking in terms of "PDA", "phone", "music player", etc. they should think more abstractly, in terms of "I/O", "communications", "storage" etc.

I've got a PDA, cellphone, and iPod. Each of them has a screen and CPU. Why is that? It's completely wasteful! I don't want a PDA with its own processor and memory and whatnot; I just want a screen that I can write on, like an electronic notepad. I don't want a phone; I just want a tranceiver. I don't want an iPod; I just want a storage device.

Wouldn't it be much better for the (pda-like) screen device to be an interface for the "phone" and "iPod"? Wouldn't it be nice for the cellular tranceiver to be only the size of a USB key and get awesome battery life, because it wouldn't need that bulky and power-hungery screen and keyboard? Wouldn't it be nice to have that 20GB of space available to the general-purpose computer instead of just for music?

Re:Convergence devices

[NanoGator]

"In my history of owning devices that do multiple things, it is always the case that they do each poorly. It is less than the sum of the parts."

Duh. Seriously, duh. The reason the extra stuff in the cell phone is interesting is that not everybody has all their fancy doodads at every given moment. A cell phone typically goes with people EVERYWHERE, but it's difficult to imagine anybody walking around with a cell phone, Game Boy, iPod, digital camera, PDA, and GPS.

You're sitting here saying "It does everything poorly" and I'm sitting here thinking "It does it less poorly than nothing at all." I've got some pictures of my nephew acting silly when we went out to dinner. I have a nice digital camera, but I wouldn't have gotten those photos if my phone didn't have a camera. Why? Because I'm not lugging that thing around everywhere I go. Okay, they're 640 by 480 and a little blurry, they're still amusing photos.

Of-freaking-course they're not going to be as good as a much more expensive dedicated device. It's like saying "I don't want a Game Boy because it's nowhere near a PS2."