Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iPod Family, iTunes
Motorola: "ROKR 2 won't suck. We promise..."
Peter Rojas over at Engadget writes a bit about the ROKR, recapping nicely all the old news about the ROKR that basically translates to: "This phone sucks as both an iPod and a phone." The interesting bit comes in the second paragraph of the post where Motorola states in this BusinessWeek article that the next ROKR will be better with slider-style sleekness, a one megapixel camera, 3.5mm headphone jack, and capacity to support up to 1000 songs. Sounds good, but the whole "we promise this one *won't* suck" spin kind of falls flat when Motorola executive Ron Garriques says that it might not have iTunes and that whether it does or not depends entirely upon Cingular and Apple.
Okay, so you're saying that since you screwed up (through bad design) the first iteration of the iTunes phone that everyone had been rumor-mongering about for a good year before its release that you're going to come out with another one that fixes all those problems but loses the iTunes goodness that got everyone excited in the first place? Sure, Ron. That'll fly ... like a brick.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
alex said 1:52PM on 11-16-2005
yes, the rokr is a bomb. why? pretty much because his steveness and cingular made it so. tuaw has posted links before to articles discussing the behind-the-scenes rokr timeline, and the reasons why it's stuck w/ 100 song capacity (steve's paranoia about cannibalizing ipod sales) and no over-the-air purchasing through itunes (cingular wants a large slice of that pie, making it financially impossible). the rokr being late to market had everything to do with apple and cingular, and very little to do w/ moto. i'm not a huge moto fan at all (i've never liked their phones, for the most part), but you can't rewrite history, c.k. apple's biding its time till they go MVNO and put out a real-deal iphone - poisoning the well with the rokr just gives them more time to get ready.
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Navypoo said 3:22PM on 11-16-2005
So Moto is designing a phone JUST for iTunes? Because the ROKR is a year-old phone with JAVA iTunes slapped on it.
It seems that the upcoming RAZR with iTunes will solve most of the problems of the original ROKR.
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C.K. Sample, III said 2:50PM on 11-16-2005
"you can't rewrite history, c.k."
That's not what Napoleon told me on the phone last night...
J/k.... I'm not saying Apple is blameless here. What I'm saying is that to drop iTunes from the Rokr would be just as pointless as releasing another one that is poorly designed with iTunes. People are buying it (and returning it) b/c of the iPod association.
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