Motorola ROKR iTunes Phone Not Living Up To The Hype?

There have been mixed emotions since Apple’s introduction of its ‘iTunes phone’ (ROKR) during its September 2005 unveiling ceremony at the infamous San Francisco, Moscone Center.

Undoubtedly, some of us imagined a sleek, slim and impeccably industrial designed phone whilst others still stand sceptical over Motorola’s cell phone software improvements. This became exacerbated when Steve, in his onstage demonstration of one of the ROKR’s most crucial features: effortless switching from MP3 player to phone and back again. After taking a call from a colleague, he went back to … nothing. Silence. “Well,” he said, looking perplexed, “I’m supposed to be able to resume the music right back to where it was. …” Then: “Oops! I hit the wrong button.”

To compound the issue further, reading the fine print you discovered that you can’t use it to buy music over the airwaves, that it’s painfully slow at loading songs from iTunes on your computer, and that it comes restricted to a 100-song limit. No matter how much of its 512 megabytes of flash memory you have left, you cannot load any more tracks.

The feedback so far: disappointing.

Back in the day, Steve rallied his motley crew of developers of the first MacIntosh, dubbing himself together with them the ‘pirates’ within Apple Computer. With the advent of the ROKR, the Jolly Roger might be flying high once again. Without the ability to download songs off the cellular network airwaves, users are restricted to buying their music and managing their tunes using the iTunes Music Store. Effectively, bypassing a digital carrier’s cellular network and billing mechanism.

This is enforced by Apple’s FairPlay – Apple’s digital rights management software. FairPlay sets limits on the ROKR: It cannot play music from any major online store but iTunes and can’t hold more than 100 songs.

Although, this is doing what’s best for Apple, it is certainly a factor that may hamper the wide distribution of the ROKR and although meetings were scheduled with some of the world’s largest carriers – Vodafone, Telefonica, Orange, Cingular, they were bound to reject the handset Motorola and Apple were offering for any number of reasons. One of which is the direct competition from Apple’s iTunes music store’s monopoly.