I was braced for the worst. Seldom have I read so many bad reviews about a new mobile phone as the Motorola ROKR, the device that has been hyped for months as the so-called iPod phone, which will perform as both a music player with a large memory for tracks and a phone.
No more need to carry two bits of kit when one will do. But hardly anyone seems to like it. Phrases such as "lame", "it sucks" or "this product has bomb written all over it" pepper the reviews, especially on the web.
Then I did what I suspect quite a few critics - relying only on the specifications - had not done. I opened the package. First I connected the phone to my computer, a Mac, (but it also works on PCs) through the USB port. Instantly, a message came up asking if I wanted to download a random selection of tracks from my iTunes library. I pressed Yes and they were dispatched to the phone, where they arrived in alphabetical order (which is why Chuck Berry''s Sweet Sixteen is before Symphony in A Major for Strings.) When the downloading was done (which took a little while), I pressed the dedicated music key on the phone, scrolled down the playlist and clicked on a tune. It produced a fair noise without earphones and with them, it offered - to my admittedly unsophisticated ears - a high-quality sound. This ease of use - unusual in a mobile phone - was extended to the camera. One click of a button on the side of the phone and the camera is ready. One more click and it is stored with the option of saving it to memory or as the wallpaper on the front of the phone or sending as a multimedia message. So why all the hostility? Simple. Most of the criticism was made by existing iPod users outraged that the phone "only" offered 100 songs in memory instead of the 1,000 songs you need in an iPod to preserve your street cred. I have news for them. It isn''t aimed at existing iPod users but at the vast majority of people who own mobile phones but not iPods. These are a curious body of people (and I am among them even though I do have an iPod). They do not need 1,000 songs to carry around and find 100 at a time more than enough. For such people this phone is a major advance because of its ease of use and because it has a camera and many other functions bundled into a nice retro-ish phone that weighs just under 100g. People have been speculating about the oft-postponed release of the ROKR and the fact that Apple boss Steve Jobs completely upstaged the launch of the Motorola by launching Apple''s iPod nano at the same time. As spoilers go that was heavy stuff. To iPodistas the new features of the nano were further proof of the phone''s inferiority. But maybe Jobs did his diversion because he was more worried about how good it might look to future iPod purchasers. He gets his profits not from low-margin songs, but from high-margin iPods. Maybe he didn''t want the ROKR to be successful too quickly because it would prevent the iPod from increasing its market share for low volume music users. The ROKR, it should be said, has some defects. The mini-joystick on mine was so sensitive it would launch the browser as the cursor passed over. The Bluetooth function (which I didn''t manage to get to work) is difficult to find, probably because the operators want you to send your photos by (revenue-earning) multimedia messages rather than by (free) wireless. That may also be the reason why it does not have a radio (unlike its rival, the Sony Ericsson Walkman, which has a very good one). The operators do not want you to be listening - or copying - free what you could be paying for. That apart, this is a phone that will fit the bill for a very large number of people. But they won''t be doing a hard sell in an Apple shop. The phone costs ?30 or from zero upwards on a monthly contract.
Victor Keegan, The Guardian
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