iPhone Launches — Buzz Dies

The iTunes enabled Rokr E1Apple and Motorola finally moved the iPhone from vapourware to marketable item today with the launch of the Rokr E1 which comes preloaded with iTunes software. For the past year the media has been awash with speculation and predictions on the iPhone over such factors as what it would look like, how many songs it would hold, the interface, whether it would kill the iPod and/or the mobile phone and so on. After the launch this morning pretty much every story follows the “$249, 2-year contract, 100 songs” format, perhaps tossing in the comment by Steve Jobs that “It’s an iPod shuffle right on your phone”. So what happened?
Well, basically, the Rokr E1 is merely “good enough”…now that it has launched pretty much nothing will change. The handset (pictured) is not an extremely clunky device but it’s not ground-breaking either…it’s not sleek, or new, or anything that people expected from Apple (if not from Motorola). As TechDirt wrote in its post titled iTunes Phone As iLame As iExpected: “The expectation was that this would be an “iPod phone”, and along with those expectations came the hype.”
The 100-song limit is not going to be setting any new paradigms in the mobile music world, Nokia’s N91 (released five months ago) can hold up to 3000 songs. The iPodobserver wrote: “If you already own or plan to own an iPod shuffle, iPod mini, or iPod nano, the ROKR E1 doesn’t offer much in the way of a compelling phone. Having waited myself a few months to purchase a new phone on account of seeing what Apple and Motorola would bring to the table, I’ll be ordering an S710a today.” Basically, if you already own a portable MP3 player you’ll probably want a different phone, and if you’re not planning on buying a new phone it’s probably preferable to buy an iPod of some form.
The interface is reportedly as disappointing as the naysayers predicted. Ilounge reports even Jobs had trouble using it during the demo: “In attempting to demonstrate its ability to resume playback after a phone call, Apple CEO Steve Jobs could not get the feature to work, saying that he had pressed a wrong button.”
Motorola iPhone AdPerhaps one issue is that Apple doesn’t seem to be that interested in the phone. It’s almost like the company got drunk with Motorola one night and agreed to a “really cool” partnership, and was horrified during its hangover to learn it had actually signed a contract. At least half of the coverage today was stolen by the iPod Nano (which is cool, but when all is said and done is really just a very small iPod), and it’s the iPod Nano that gets main billing on the Apple site. Motorola, on the other hand, is showing the pictures to its mates and bragging about its “the great score”. The Motorola site starts with a flash add for the handset (which I actually quite liked) and devotes almost its entire front page to the device…probably because the handset definitively sets them apart from other manufacturers.
It’s possible that we in the industry are just too close to the deal. The real test will be how many handsets are sold to Joe Public, who likes nice safe brands. If people choose the handset when upgrading Motorola will be happy. If people choose Cingular over their current carrier because they want an iTunes handset Cingular will be happy. It’s hard to tell whether Apple will ever really give a toss.

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