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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."
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.
What's most puzzling is: It's all the same OS. Their cheapest and most expensive phones have an almost identical menu structure. Making a Java/iTunes app shouldn't have taken as long as it did.
Lastly. A RAZR is free with a 2 year contract. A 512mb shuffle (which holds more songs) is $80. The two of them together in the same pocket is a better solution than the ROKR....and will go longer on a charge!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
But "sabotage"?!? Motorola isn't a couple of kids with a lemonade stand, and it's not even a huge corporation operating outside its normal business. Surely they have enough experience with portable consumer electronics to have dealt with Apple with their eyes open.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
That's just what they want you to think.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
There is a simple explanation for the 100 song limit that has already been alluded to in various statements by Motorola and Apple.
The SanDisk Transflash drive in the phone is removable and replaceable. There is nothing stopping a ROKR owner from replacing the 512M drive with a much larger one (such as the 1G version). Therefore it makes perfect since to put an artificial limit on the number of songs. The USB 1.1 transfer rates are likely a factor as well.
I own one, and use iTunes on a nearly daily basis on public transportation to and from work. It's much more discrete than carrying around an iPod (two of which I also own) and is something I have to have in my pocket anyway. The 100 song limit doesn't bother me so much, and I refill it about once a week so the transfer rates, while annoying, are tolerable.
And yes, the phone's interface is a bit clunky, but I find most cell phones suffer from this affliction. My biggest gripe is what appears to be a lack of processing power. The command response borders on dreadful. A more complete j2me environment would have been helpful as well, but that's generally an issue with Motorola.
Hate to point out the obvious, but apple does like control over products using it's services. Is it really that far fetched?
Of course it isn't - if you're leveraging Apple's stuff, then prepare for them to protect their own best interests as well. However the idea that they were trying to sour consumers on the idea of integrated devices sounds a little bit ridiculous (though it earned that terribly-heavyweight site lots of views) - Consumers don't have such a disconnect between devices, and a good MP3 player, whether a part of a cellphone, a PDA, or a stand-alone, is a good MP3 player, and the bad ones are bad ones. Indeed, there are a lot of terrible stand-alone MP3 players by shoddy companies, but I'd hardly say that it "soured the market" such that the iPod couldn't happen. It sounds more likely that Apple wanted to limit how much the specific device ate into their own sales - all of the advantages of the iPod, but with a couple of limitations. It says or predicts nothinga bout competing devices.
Personally I think the time is long overdue for good integrated cell/pda/mp3 players. MP3 playing in particular is so trivial that it's absurd that we have such powerful electronics that we lug around, but they can't credibly and easily play mp3s. Usually the implementation is ridiculously short sighted (I got a PDA to double as an MP3 player, and everything worked great but the DAC was terribly low quality. A couple of cents and they destroyed that entire use).
this does add up my friend, another article like this was available the day after the crappy rokr came out. apple likely plans on releasing a phone that they design themself in the future.
How does that add up? You claim they intentionally made a crappy product branded with the itunes name and they made it crappy to promote sales of a new phone they plan to release with the itunes name? It's called poisoning the brand and it is not a good thing. People that buy a crappy itunes phone are unlikely to buy another. And will advise others against it, even if all the drawbacks of the first one are solved.
I don't think the time is right for a "good integrated cell/pda/mp3 player". I think the problem is the life expectancy and different function of each of these items. I expect to keep a cell phone for the length of my contract (1-2 years) and it will serve me for work and personal use. My PDA is pretty much work only, but I may expect to hold on to it longer than a year or two. Finally, an MP3 player is strictly for my personal enjoyment and I will keep it as long as it works (or until something vastly superior comes along).
I want specialized devices, not a "jack of all trades, master of none" device and I don't think I am alone in this. So I think to say that a "good integrated cell/pda/mp3 player" is long overdue just isn't true.
Finding other idiots on
Yeah, no kidding. I can usually make do with a single audio CD's worth of music for a few days before needing to swap out.
If the ROKR is failing, the only reason it's doing so is because the cell phone market is absolutely saturated. Everyone that wants one already has a phone, and phones aren't fashion items anymore. iPod is.
I want specialized devices, not a "jack of all trades, master of none" device and I don't think I am alone in this.
This line gets dragged out everytime this gets brought up, yet already our electronics have seen integration, and it is only going to continue - indeed accelerate. There is a point in PDAs, MP3 players, and cell phones, where it is good enough to completely satsify the majority of consumers - it is, in effect, a master of the realm if it satisfies the consumer, even if a specialized high-end stand-alone unit lets them add irrelevant effects to their music. I love my Digital Rebel XT, yet there are a lot of people for whom the digital camera in their cell phone is more than adequate (with extreme portability to boot).
My cell phone already has a pretty powerful processor in it, a good colour screen, a very capable data entry/navigation system, it's tiny, and has a fantastic battery. Flash memory is getting ultra cheap, so it's obvious that cell phones are increasibly going to integrate MP3 players (and FM radios), and even video and PDA functionality (of course you could say that PDAs are integrating cell phones - it's all the same thing). Why should I carry three different devices - all of them powered by general purpose CPUs (often the SAME CPU) just running different software, with a slightly different form?
If the ROKR is failing, the only reason it's doing so is because the cell phone market is absolutely saturated.
DING DING DING DING!!!
Look at that! Somebody finally got to the crux of the issue.
I think the ROKR looks like a nifty phone, but there's no way I'm buying one because my current phone (also made by Motorola) required that I subscribe to two years of T-Mobile service in order to get it at a sensible price. That was only a few months ago.
To buy an ROKR, I would have to break that contract (paying an obscene early-exit fee), and sign up for Cingular (another good service provider, but considerably more expensive than my current plan.)
Ultimately, that would mean hundreds of dollars just to make this minor upgrade over my current Motorola phone (which I'm far from 100% happy with, by the way.) I'm far better off waiting another year and a half for my current service contract to expire and see what's out there at that time, or else just attaching a shuffle to my current phone with hot glue if I really need an all-in-one device so damn badly.
I'm sure I'm far from the only person out there in such a position.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Let's see - Moto strangled the G5, forcing Apple to IBM, and then to finally say "fuck the lot of you" and go over to Intel.
Ooooh- but then again, Apple pulled the plug on the clones, screwing Moto out of millions...
Oooooh, but then again...
Basically, Apple and Moto have been bad for each other for YEARS - this latest notion comes as no surprise.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
exactly.
that is why I have a treo 600 in my pocket.
I have a mp3 player that works great, interrupts the song with a ring during a call and allows me to answer by pressing a button on my stereo headset nd take the call with the headset. I get the bonus of getting rid of my palm PDA with it and have that legendary stability of palm (the reason why I got the 600 instead of the 650)
plus I can watch tv shows and movies from my replayTV or computer on it as well.
so it doesnt use itunes, big whoop to me and many other people.
this phone is not the first mp3 player/phone to ever exist even though they are trying to market it that way.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.