Behind the scenes of the ROKR failure

Does anyone else thing that maybe this whole phone thing was Stevie J's way of getting friendly with the network owners? Honestly I don't thing Steve gives a damn about Motorola, they are a competitor in some manner of speaking. The network is what Apple wants access to, so they will have a carrier available when they do decide to produce an Apple Phone, iPhone, whatever.

So, who would buy a RAZR or PEBL that was compatible with iTunes? Show of hands? I would.

I would totally buy (money issues aside...) an iPod with phone functionality. Come on Apple. A 30 gig with a little slot to plug a SIM-card and here we go. I have been working a lot with phones (developing java apps) and frankly my experience says that motorola hasn't had great products for a while. Things like the razor might look stylish but the UI is always as impracticable. Ever tried adding a shortcut to a wap page with a Motorola Vxx phone? If that's what they call intuititve I am not inclined to try the Roker at all.

They also forget one big thing: the iPod NAME. So what if it's a phone with iTunes, if this was called the iPod Phone or something of that nature it would be sold out along with the nano and 5G. Name is big now, and I think that's another way either Apple played the cards correctly (and screwed Moto), or Moto played incorrectly.

Not that Apple doesn't deserve a huge chunk of blame for making the ROKR so weak, but the thing that tends to get overlooked in these discussions is how thoroughly mediocre ROKR is as a phone. It's clunky, slow, and burdened with Moto's outdated OS. Like most Moto phones, it doesn't have much in the way of style, usability, user-friendliness, or features. All it ever had going for it was the promise of great iTunes integration, and we all know how that story ended.

Why feel sorry for Motorola? They were the ones responsible for pushing this (f)ugly 2 year old cell phone onto the market and expecting it to be a raving success just because it was iTunes compatible. The market wanted a RAZR phone with iTunes compatibility, not this POS model. Heck, the PEBL with iTunes compatibility would also be nice. But did Motorola offer either? No. They thought they'd exploit the early adopters and then release their other iTunes phones a few months later. Let this phone die an ignoble death which is what it deserves. And I'll keep my fingers crossed that we'll eventually see some iTunes compatible phones via T-Mobile here in the U.S. because T-Mobile sucks a whole lot less than those chimps at SBC monopolist owned Cingular.