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Background to the ROKR catastrophe - it's Apple Vs Motorola, to the death!

Nice to see Wired following our lead in condemning the Motorola ROKR phone as flawed, even to the point of quoting Steve Jobs's inability to "pause, resume" playing music when a call comes in. But Wired is more optimistic than NewsWireless...

In a long analysis of the background to the genesis of ROKR, writer Frank Rose says that -contrary to the NewsWireless thesis - it's easy to make a great cellphone which is also a great music player:

"None of this is difficult. The technology to make a cell phone do double duty as an MP3 player is readily available. Motorola and other companies have been selling phones that play music in Europe and Asia for a couple of years now - handsets with lots of memory and serious audio capabilities. And with the iPod, Apple showed how to turn an ordinary MP3 player into a great one."

But Rose also agrees that it didn't work: "Put it all together and you get - the ROKR? How does a great idea get this botched?"

His analysis: both companies were quietly sabotaging the deal.

The story has some great background on how Jobs and Zander set it up, and what problems they solved. What it seems to lack, is any realisation of the fact that actually, it is difficult to make a device which is both a great phone and a great iPod.

The problem is that power limitations mean you don't want to play too many tunes before your phone goes dead; that you don't want to have too many calls before your MP3 player goes quiet; and that the controls are a compromise.

A great phone is hard enough to build; a great music player is pretty rare. The combination of the two has been tried, often, but the phones Rose quotes in Asia and Europe are not the successes he implies.