The Battle for the Mp3 Phone

Frank Rose wrote in Wired last week.

“Consumers want an iPod phone that will play any song, anytime, anywhere. Just four little problems: the cell carriers, the record labels, the handset makers, and Apple itself. The inside story of why the ROKR went wrong.* (*And what it will take to make a truly rocking music phone.)

One sign that the ROKR, the new iTunes phone from Motorola, might not live up to expectations came during its September unveiling ceremony at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. In the midst of an elaborate presentation of new products, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, faltered 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.” Maybe not the ROKR’s fault, but since Jobs’ presentations are usually flawless, certainly not a good omen.

When Jobs and Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola, announced 15 months ago that the two companies were going to partner on a new phone, people imagined a hybrid of two of the coolest products in existence: Apple’s iPod and Moto’s RAZR. For months the new gizmo glimmered mirage-like on gadget sites – ever promised, never delivered. When it finally did show up, it bore the unmistakable hump of a committee camel. Not sleek like an iPod, not slim like a RAZR – and when you saw 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 pre-hobbled with a 100-song limit.

No matter how much of its 512 megabytes of flash memory you have left, you can’t load any more tracks onto the thing. The consensus: disappointing.”