Today, we're introducing three revolutionary products in this class.
The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.
The seconds is a revolutionary mobile phone.
And the third is a breakthrough internet communicator.
An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.
An iPod, a phone... are you getting it?
These are not three separate devices; this is one device.
The reveal of the original iPhone at Macworld 2007 has already gone down in history as
one of the greatest product announcements of all time and it’s used as an example
to teach intel property strategy, marketing,
and public speaking classes in universities around the world.
The fruits of that first iPhone’s existence are obvious—and even if you
hate Apple—you have to give them credit for forming the principles of what the modern
smartphone would become.
Look no further than the smartphones that existed before
the iPhone and the smartphones after the iPhone.
Look no further than the 2007 Android prototype contrasted to the HTC Dream
on which Android debuted... nearly two years after the announcement of the original
iPhone.
But the 2007 iPhone wasn’t technically Apple’s first phone announcement.
There's one more thing about iTunes that we're announcing today.
You've probably heard about this.
Today, we're introducing the iTunes phone.
Weird, right?
Well, not really.
The iTunes Phone became known as the ROKR... and
Steve Jobs announced the ROKR at a time when the iPod made up 45% of Apple’s
revenue.
For a company that just a few years prior had been on the verge of
bankruptcy, the iPod was Apple’s much­needed saving grace and it’s market
dominance was irrefutable.
But Apple knew that the market segment they triumphed
was not long for the world as multipurpose devices from Blackberry, Palm, and others
began integrating competent music playback capabilities—not to mention the bevy of
other features that the single­purpose iPod simply couldn’t match.
So Apple began working on their own multipurpose device in summer of 2004.
You may remember this little clip from the 2007 iPhone
reveal....
What’s truly funny about that is Apple had indeed designed and tested a number
of cellular­capable iPods (click­wheel and all) as early as summer 2004.
But rather than expand on Tony Fadell’s iPod team,
Jobs decided to work with Scott Forstall’s Macintosh team in shrinking down OS X to a
touch­screen based smartphone.
Thanks to the 2012 Apple vs. Samsung trial, we
ended up seeing nearly 40 different completed, industrial templates Apple had
considered for the original iPhone.
But look, it’s 2005 and the iPhone is still years away from a public unveiling.
So what does Apple do to make sure the iPod functionality
isn’t replaced by new phones?
They partner with one of the biggest names in phones,
of course.
Well actually, that isn’t really an “of course” at all as it was
very un­Jobsian to partner with other companies, but
Motorola was absolutely killing it in the mid­2000s with hits like the RAZR of which
Jobs was famously a fan.
But this hopeful partnership ended in ruins despite a massive marketing campaign with
dozens of famous artists endorsing the device.
Why?
Well, I bought one to find out and boy... is it bad.
I wish I still had my Moto RAZR (which was my first phone ever) to
compare to this thing because they don’t even look like they’re from the same decade
and yet, the RAZR was 18 months older than the ROKR.
The design of the ROKR looks pretty bad—it was a rebranded low­end candybar
phone Motorola had already been selling for about 2 years without music functionality.
It feels cheap and plasticy in general, the T9 keys are extremely wobbly, and the display
is pretty dismal and small even for the era.
The 0.3 megapixel camera produces some of the worst digital images
I’ve ever seen (and that’s even comparing it to other phones on the market at the time),
and the software is bad.
And no...
I’m not really even talking about Motorola’s software
as that was pretty similar to all of Motorola’s phones at the time.
I’m talking about iTunes.
Or so they called it.
When you hit the dedicated iTunes button on the front of the
phone, a very familiar UI comes up.
It looks like an iPod not iTunes.
And similar to an iPod, you couldn’t purchase, download, or
manage songs on the device itself so that’s definitely closer to an iPod than iTunes.
But boy... it sure isn’t an iPod either.
Music was stored on a microSD card that hid itself along
with the full­sized SIM card underneath the removable battery at the back of the device.
Most variants of the phone shipped with a 512MB microSD card with support for up to
a 1GB card but the storage capacity was nearly irrelevant because the device had a
software­limited 100 song cap.
While I couldn’t find definitive proof, it seems
that certain regions outside the US may have even had a 50 song cap.
The reasons for doing this seem pretty obvious to me...
Apple didn’t want people buying the ROKR over
an iPod.
The song cap could entice those who didn’t have an iPod to get the real
thing and for those that did, the ROKR would act
as an iPod to­go when they didn’t have their full­size music player on hand.
But the convenience of the iPod software decreased significantly with such a limited
library size, the 4­way toggle was vastly inferior to the scroll wheel making navigating
the UI a pretty poor experience, and syncing songs to iTunes was painful with only USB
1 support making it slower than competing iPods at transferring music.
The DAC and headphone amp inside is a lot worse than iPods
of the era and it sounds pretty poor— even on easy­to­drive headphones—and given
that this thing was announced the same day as iPod nano, it was doomed from the start.
The nano was at the time impossibly small, inexpensive, and competent—none of
which could be said about the ROKR.
Jobs himself had some trouble with the software
during the demo and he was less than pleased...
"Yeah, I'll talk to you later, thanks bye."
So, I go there and I jus... resume my music back to where it was... well I was supposed
to resume my music right back to where it was...
Steve’s face says it all and the relationship soured pretty quickly.
Moto blamed Apple.
Vice versa.
Apple even went so far as to remove support for the ROKR
after iTunes 7—just one full version later—and I needed to pull out my old PowerBook
G4 running Tiger to set this thing up.
That’s a stark contrast from the iPod.
Every iPod ever made remains supported in the latest
version of iTunes.
Including the iPod mini which I unboxed with Austin Evans.
You should definitely check that out if you haven’t
seen it.
The ROKR was a weird little hiccup in Apple’s otherwise excellent track­record
during the first decade of the new millennium and look, I’m no expert, but I think they
turned out okay.
Apple, that is.
Goodbye Moto.
And goodbye to you!
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