The thing is ugly as sin. It looks like a blackberry mated with a 1998-era Nokia.
Posted on 10/24/2005 4:35:45 PM PDT by xcamel
Motorola's chief executive has admitted that the company may have got it wrong with the recently released, iTunes-compatible ROKR phone.
Ed Zander was responding to news that the number of people returning the phone is six times higher than normal according to American Technology Report.
'We got off to a little bit of a rough start,' Zander said. 'People were looking for an iPod and that's not what it is. We may have missed the marketing message there.'
He acknowledged that Motorola has failed to explain that the phone stores fewer songs than even the smallest iPod, but sells for the same price as an iPod nano.
The American Technology Report findings were revealed by analyst Albert Lin who concluded that 'there's an overall disappointment with the product'.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who unveiled the ROKR at the beginning of September, said last week that he expects to see more iTunes phones, having previously explained that the company was testing the water with the Motorola handset.
The thing is ugly as sin. It looks like a blackberry mated with a 1998-era Nokia.
Holy Iridium, Batman!!!!
It was intentionally crippled. 100 songs get boring fast.
Say what? what happened to the good old days when a phone was a shoe and you had a 1,000 pairs in your closet?
It's not selling because the target demographic (young adults) thinks big candy-bar phones are clunky.
I am so sick of companies doing this to squeeze the last penny out of their customers.
Verizon did the same thing with the Motorola v710, crippling it badly so that they could sell overpriced, inferior software and ringtones rather than letting you do your own thing with Bluetooth OBEX file transfer. Other companies like Cingular and T-Mobile do no such thing. Verizon gets away with it only because their network and reception are so clearly superior.
Unlike other makers such as BMW and Lexus, Mercedes doesn't allow you to hook up any phone to their on-board systems other than those they sell (for 400% of the price the same phone would cost in the open market. )
I refuse to patronize companies that do business this way.
Still, you've got to feel bad for the CEO of Motorola. Here is Steve Jobs launching the ROKR, Motorola's big day in the sun, and near the end of the product launch, Steve Jobs does his "Oh-by-the-way" act and pulls this little thing called a "Nano" out of his jeans pocket and suddenly nobody is thinking about ROKR anymore. Ouch.
Yet again, thanks to their coverage superiority, they get away with it. Folks who can't cut the credit mustard go over to Sprint or Cingular.
There's nothing wrong with having a multifunction device, as long as you aren't compromising quality. In this case, Motorola blew it by tucking a lousy MP3 player into an otherwise decent phone...and then marketing the whole thing as an MP3 player that also made phone calls. It didn't do what people expected, so they wanted their money back.
Look at the size of the Nano and tell me that they couldn't integrate those electronics into a cellphone. You could even replicate the controls of a Nano with phone buttons easily. If they'd done that, this thing would have flown off the shelves. They didn't, so they didn't.
I'm still waiting for my bluetooth enables, 802.11g compliant, Outlook compatible, WinCE running pocket PDA cellphone with the 4" screen, folding keyboard, integrated 8 megapixel digital camera, and MP3 player/voice recorder with at least a gig of storage. Someday, someone will make one, and I'll buy it. For now I'll just have to continue whining about having to carry 10 different devices :)
LOL....how I enjoyed your post......I am still using smoke signals as I don't even have a cell phone.
I finally got one about a year ago. It's usually turned off, just like the PDA I got a couple of months ago.
LOL! Now, that's high tech.
A cell phone? sheesh, all these people walking around the shopping center talking to themselves, or so it seems.
I've had a cell phone for 18 years. I've outgrown having to have it with me.
Leaving your cell phone off...the new status symbol.
Hear, hear. Like not wearing a necktie. A tie is the mark of the third assistant night manager at Burger King, not a man who is the master of his own destiny.
-ccm
It's gettin hard to tell the schizoids from the norms nowadays!
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