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Steve Jobs launches ROKR phone with iTunes in it, with Motorola

It looked as if he was going to disappoint us: he spent the first half hour of his launch of the iPod phone not talking about the iPod phone.

Apple's CEO stood on the San Francisco stage at the Moscone Center, and did his thing. He started off with the iTunes v5 launch. He boasted about how many  songs are in the iTunes library (two million) how many people have downloaded iTunes (ten million) how many tunes the average iTunes customer has (60) and how many Podcasts are available (15,000) - and then he announced two exclusives:

and we started to get that sinking feeling. "They aren't going to announce the phone!"

And then: "Oh, one other thing about iTunes."

...and the sound of the ROKR ringing. "We have an iTunes client on this iPod phone."

The ROKR [left] is, said Jobs, basically a Shuffle. It has 100 tunes. They both have "autofill" to add new songs after you select your favourites. They neither have the "wheel" - and that may be where it fails.

In his Demo, Steve Jobs showed us how, if a call comes in, the music pauses; when the phone call is over, it resumes where it was. Well, demos never work; his didn't. He "pressed the wrong button."

We'll see how it goes. It is a quad-band phone, 3G; it has pretty good battery life; it's cute and neat. And it has all iTunes features, which opens up the 80% market share holder to the phone business.