Did Apple Sabotage the ROKR?

JPigford writes "The Apple Blog makes claim that Apple sabotaged the success of the ROKR so as to sway public opinion of MP3 cell phones in general...ultimately to drive more sales to the iPod. By mandating a 100 song limit on the ROKR and having the product flop, Apple was able to put a bad taste in the mouths of consumers so that not only do they drive more iPod sales, but they keep competitors from fighting back with their own MP3 phones."

Comments

Re:Maybe, but Motorola helped.

[KarmaPolice]

Have you held a ROKR and RAZR at the same time? It's like Motorola can make a gadget pretty, or functional, but not both at the same time.

Well, the new RAZR V3i seems to be both, so there goes you argument and TFA straight down the drain!

I could only find this danish article, but it's got a perdy picture:
http://comon.dk/index.php/news/show/id=24259

First hand experiance with the ROKR

[jandrese]

I bought the ROKR for my Wife because she needed a new phone (Cingular was telling her that her old one was being obsoleted and would be shut off eventually) and because I wanted her to stop stealing my iPod all of the time.

Overall, I think people have been too harsh on this little phone. It does have some flaws, but overall it's pretty nice. It even has some surprises, like the phone speaker good enough to use the little guy like a tiny boombox. Also, people are focusing on the wrong things when they complain about the phone, the 100 song limit isn't the real issue (think of it like the Shuffle, not a regular iPod), it's the USB1 interface that makes loading songs an almost overnight affair. Also, the battery life seems a bit short to me, although I suspect there will be a firmware upgrade for it at some point to keep it from draining the battery after only 1 day of sitting idle. The lights on the side are kinda cool, but really touchy and better left disabled. The camera is surprisingly good for a phone though. The 100 song limit is not a huge deal because the phone only comes with 512MB of memory anyway and 100 average length songs does a pretty good job of filling that up. It's only a big issue if you don't believe in listening to any song longer than 30 seconds or something.

Despite the drawbacks, the phone does a pretty good job of what it's supposed to do, and the interface on the phone is quite nice.

Quick tip for anybody with the ROKR: Enable the option in iTunes that downcoverts all songs to 128kbps. If you don't do that, it will just silently refuse to load any song encoded higher and make you pull your hair out in frustration while you try to figure out why half of your playlist is being silently ignored.

Re:Maybe, but Motorola helped.

[plover]

I have a RAZR V3, and it's pretty but not very functional.

The Bluetooth flat-out sucks. I have to reboot my phone after transferring files to and from my PCs, because the stack gets corrupted and it can no longer accept connections. The phone has no OBEX client for browsing other devices. And when the Bluetooth does work and connect to my car kit, it remains connected for as long as the car is on. I can't use the Bluetooth from my Tungsten to get to the network because the phone is in session with the car. My Sony-Ericsson T637 would sort-of ignore the car's request to bind, and would just try a quick connect to its headset every time the phone rang.

Motorola's phone book application sucks. Their speed dial system consists of rearranging the order of entries on the SIM card.

The thing is sl-l-l-o-o-o-o-w to boot -- over a minute. Menu responsiveness is also dismal.

And, while the salesman told me that this phone would have video recording capability, it did not. Later RAZRs do have it, and apparently someone has the software available online to reflash it to add video.

It does have some bright spots, though. The audio quality is very, very good. The onboard camera is the best quality cell-phone camera I've ever seen (640x480 VGA, good brightness adjustment.) The screen is crystal clear, and visible in virtually every lighting condition. Voice recognition for voice dialing has been aggressively good. It can play MP3 ring tones in addition to the lame DRM-encumbered formats it came with. And it has pretty good battery life.

Re:Doesn't add up.

[buckhead_buddy]

bigman2003 wrote:

This is one of the few conspiracy theories that I might actually agree with. Apple, and Sony have the need to push their own products- and damn anyone who wants them to change.

HP iPod? Dead Apple ][ Clones? Mac Clones?

Apple likes to be the only source..it's more profitable that way.

The trouble is that all of these situations are different and don't really suggest any sort of pattern. HP iPod This was a rebranded iPod with HP nameplate, almost like the U2 iPod except that Apple did no promotion of the HP product. HP sold it in places like Office Depot where Apple really had no sales presence. Killed by HP after the shift of the CEO's and a desire for the non-Carly compay to be perceived as a business, rather than consumer, powerhouse. If there was more subversive motivation behind it, it was from an Apple competitor (e.g. Creative or Microsoft) encouraging HP to drop their iPod. Apple ][ clones Competitors like Franklin were outright stealing the ROM code from Apple to power their clone. They didn't reverse engineer anything. There was no license agreement, no corporate cooperation; these examples were just outright theft but in an era when Intellectual Property laws weren't as clear in regards to computer code. Mac clones This was the pre-Jobs plan under Gil Amelio as CEO to license the classic Mac architecture and make money off of sales of the System 7.6 & System 8 OS. Many companies were interested. Steve Jobs returned with the "future" Mac OS and saw this initiative as both burdensome for future development and financially very unfavorable to Apple. If you recall new agreements were made and Apple made a couple of lame duck releases to fulfill the word of the old agreements. Companies lost interest in the new terms. Now you're leaping to the ROKR and saying this fits the same Apple pattern? Not to my mind. Apple and Motorolla give the appearance that this is co-developed. Was it? That's debatable, but it's already a significantly different situation.

Or you could just....

[zigziggityzoo]

Or, you could just buy one on ebay without the discounts at actual retail price, and swap sim cards.

Re:Doesn't add up.

[thadman08]

I call AAC a standard that can be licensed by anyone.

My guess is that you're more concerned with the Fairplay DRM that comes attached to songs purchased from iTunes. The iPod is quite capable of playing MP3s and iTunes is more than happy to let you rip songs to MP3 format.