Did Apple Sabotage the ROKR? 502
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."
Re:Maybe, but Motorola helped. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the new RAZR V3i seems to be both, so there goes you argument and TFA straight down the drain!
I could only find this danish article, but it's got a perdy picture:
http://comon.dk/index.php/news/show/id=24259 [comon.dk]
First hand experiance with the ROKR (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Maybe, but Motorola helped. (Score:4, Informative)
The Bluetooth flat-out sucks. I have to reboot my phone after transferring files to and from my PCs, because the stack gets corrupted and it can no longer accept connections. The phone has no OBEX client for browsing other devices. And when the Bluetooth does work and connect to my car kit, it remains connected for as long as the car is on. I can't use the Bluetooth from my Tungsten to get to the network because the phone is in session with the car. My Sony-Ericsson T637 would sort-of ignore the car's request to bind, and would just try a quick connect to its headset every time the phone rang.
Motorola's phone book application sucks. Their speed dial system consists of rearranging the order of entries on the SIM card.
The thing is sl-l-l-o-o-o-o-w to boot -- over a minute. Menu responsiveness is also dismal.
And, while the salesman told me that this phone would have video recording capability, it did not. Later RAZRs do have it, and apparently someone has the software available online to reflash it to add video.
It does have some bright spots, though. The audio quality is very, very good. The onboard camera is the best quality cell-phone camera I've ever seen (640x480 VGA, good brightness adjustment.) The screen is crystal clear, and visible in virtually every lighting condition. Voice recognition for voice dialing has been aggressively good. It can play MP3 ring tones in addition to the lame DRM-encumbered formats it came with. And it has pretty good battery life.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:5, Informative)
- HP iPod
- This was a rebranded iPod with HP nameplate, almost like the U2 iPod except that Apple did no promotion of the HP product. HP sold it in places like Office Depot where Apple really had no sales presence. Killed by HP after the shift of the CEO's and a desire for the non-Carly compay to be perceived as a business, rather than consumer, powerhouse. If there was more subversive motivation behind it, it was from an Apple competitor (e.g. Creative or Microsoft) encouraging HP to drop their iPod.
- Apple ][ clones
- Competitors like Franklin were outright stealing the ROM code from Apple to power their clone. They didn't reverse engineer anything. There was no license agreement, no corporate cooperation; these examples were just outright theft but in an era when Intellectual Property laws weren't as clear in regards to computer code.
- Mac clones
- This was the pre-Jobs plan under Gil Amelio as CEO to license the classic Mac architecture and make money off of sales of the System 7.6 & System 8 OS. Many companies were interested. Steve Jobs returned with the "future" Mac OS and saw this initiative as both burdensome for future development and financially very unfavorable to Apple. If you recall new agreements were made and Apple made a couple of lame duck releases to fulfill the word of the old agreements. Companies lost interest in the new terms.
Now you're leaping to the ROKR and saying this fits the same Apple pattern? Not to my mind. Apple and Motorolla give the appearance that this is co-developed. Was it? That's debatable, but it's already a significantly different situation.Use Treo 650 (Score:3, Informative)
Palm PDA utilities, Phone capability, MP3 player without DRM, Palm apps, Word / Excel view and edit, keyboard, good size, (Crappy camera) but hours of crappy video with a 1GB card... Bluetooth is sorta suck too, but overall Treo is pretty sweet.
They need a 2MP camera, 4 GB memory standard, wifi, and wireless stereo headsets. Also some usability tweaks could help, but overall, I love it.
Re:It's probably true (Score:2, Informative)
Umm...probably not what you think it will be?
The amount of power that a cell phone is using constantly keeping in touch with the cell tower, powering the display, and carrying out a conversation (where it becomes a radio station) is enormous compared to the miniscule power needs of an MP3 player. The power impact of playing MP3s on a cell phone would be marginal at best.
That would be suicidal (Score:2, Informative)
Obviously, the ROKR loses in direct comparison with the Nokia N91 [nokia.com] and Sony-Ericsson Walkman [sonyericsson.com] but at least their product is real and on the shelves...
In the meantime, while people are either enjoying the real phones or waiting for the next big thing, Motorola improves on both designs and announces the SLVR L7...
although I don't have the sales figures for companies like apple, nokia, motorola, SE, samsung and their respective mobile phone divisions, I'd venture saying that Apple can hardly have the leverage to damage the plans of mobile phone manufacturers. I bet Apple will still be in the front line of the high end audio gadget arena with the iPod and whatever they can make of it in the future, but there is much more room for growth in the multi-use-mobile-phone-gadget market.
Bazorg!
"they keep competitors from fighting back...." (Score:1, Informative)
I have one and disagree (Score:2, Informative)
The top two things I hate about the phone by far are...
1) USB 1.1
2) Sucky camera
Apple didn't do the hardware for this phone (though they might have asked for it to be this way).
A 100 song limit isn't bad at all, doesn't *anyone* remember the cassette walkman? That was one dedicated device that limited you to far less music...unless you swapped the cassette much like you can swap the flash card.
Not that I've ever swapped the flash card or had a desire to. I usually plug it in daily update my podcasts and whatever music playlists I happen to have going on. My problem is that it takes friggin forever because of USB 1.1. With my Shuffle or Nano (wait, why do I still have iPods?), it's totally a grab and go mentallity. The ROKR takes *my* time to deal with updating as well as computer time to actually make it so.
And the camera sucks.
The new Razor sounds promising, but only if it is USB2...the problem then is that the ROKR has a really great speaker, and not just for speaker phone...I use it for listening to podcasts in my car or on my boat like as if it were a small portable radio.
Or you could just.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:3, Informative)
My guess is that you're more concerned with the Fairplay DRM that comes attached to songs purchased from iTunes. The iPod is quite capable of playing MP3s and iTunes is more than happy to let you rip songs to MP3 format.
Re:Very simple, for these kinda stories (Score:3, Informative)
So Apple can get away with charging for service packs. Imagine if MS did that.
Sorry to be the bringer of bad tidings, but Apple releasing Mac OS X 10.4 as a full-price OS is just the same as Microsoft, for example, doing the same with NT 5.1. That's Windows XP, by the way.
Apple's "service packs" are available for free through software update, just as Windows XP SP2 was through Windows Update.
That was just the prototype product (Score:3, Informative)
Now that Motorola has the hardware working, they can consider cutting Apple out of the loop. By, say, cutting a deal with WalMart [walmart.com].
Re:Bad "journalism" (Score:1, Informative)