Motorola's Zander: ROKR missed the mark

It's a shitty phone, pure and simple. It dosen't work the way it's supposed to, it comes in grey, grey, and grey, and it lacks what makes the iPod a success: the click wheel. There is no demand for this phone for a reason, people don't want a phone that plays music, they want an iPod that can make calls.

Wry: Great point, I never thought of it like that (probably because my oldest is only 2). I can easily see it filling this role.

The market for the ROKR (no it probably isn't you) is as follows. If you have a tween or teen whining for a cell phone and or an iPod; and you want them to have a Cheap Cell Phone, and curb their iPod lust, because you know, they would just lose a decent phone or a real iPod, THIS is the answer. And that is the market. Absent minded pubescent children of budget restricted parents. You don't buy them a tool if they aren't ready for a tool... you buy them a toy, that maybe you can both use without much loss incurred due to damage misplacement or theft.

Dave: So that would make you an expert voice on cell phone convergence, given that you don't have one? The reason convergence focuses on the cell phone (for better or much worse), is it's always with you. I don't always carry my iPod or my digital camera - only so many pockets - but I always have my phone. There are two very simple reasons this phone failed: 1) Ancient design, especially compared to the RAZR. The RAZR Motorola's hot style product, and where they should have put iTunes first. This is simply inexcusable - the ROKR is butt ugly. 2) Needless artificial limits on music content. Why is it limited to 100 songs, if I use a 2GB card? Why can't my songs be ringtones? This is simply companies trying to protect profits in other markets. Reason 1 will likely be fixed with the RAZRv3, but 2 is the larger one that shows no signs of going away.

Kevin: You'd think I'd be willing to drink the Kool Aid with an Apple-branded phone (I've done it before with other products, after all). But as a person who doesn't own a cell phone at all, I can't see buying one, no matter who made it. I have an iPod and a prepaid calling card. I'm good.

"Personally, I don't see the point of carrying an iPod and a phone that acts like an iPod." ...except when the apple iphone comes out, right?

let's see, the reason why its flopping is because motorola thought they could half-ass it by hoping Apple's programming genius could overshadow the fact that they stuffed the code into an old design phone that was archaic by the time it was released the first time around.

They got this one backwards. Come up with an iPod with a phone in it rather than a phone with a Shuffle in it then they might have something. Until then, this idea is going nowhere fast.