Credit: MakeMeDance

At a recently guarded press event, Apple launched its latest gadget and a product that has perhaps been long overdue: the Motorola ROKR cell phone. So why is Apple launching a Motto? It’s simply because the phone has a mobile version of iTunes and can therefore play music. According to Steve Jobs, "it’s more like a phone and a Shuffle rolled into one…"

In terms of sheer expectations, I would have to say that the ROKR fell way beyond mine, and if events keep churning the way they are, ROKR will fall short of achieving even basic industry standards. The phone can store just about 100 odd tracks while the N series phones from Nokia will store roughly a thousand. Similarly, the Sony Walkman W800i also stores just as many songs, plus you can upgrade the memory to 2GB quite easily with a memory stick. There really is no other great feature about this phone apart from the dedicated iTunes button and the fact that it automatically pauses the track when a call comes in, which isn’t particularly path breaking if you ask me.

What is the Rokr about? Why would Apple waste its time, resources and brand value on something as particularly staid as this phone which, to top it all, is locked with Cingular as the carrier. I mean seriously, the product is simply not as exuberant as Apple products are supposed to be. So what happened? Why did Apple come out with a below standard product that fails in all expectations?

The answer to that question is strategy. There was nothing wrong with the creative cells of the designers at Apple; ROKR is simply Jobs taking a calculated risk. He doesn’t want a cell phone that doubles as an MP3 player to become too popular as that would cut straight into Apple’s bread and butter product, the iPod. On the other hand, Jobs knows for a fact that in the future cell phones will play a huge role in portable digital music; therefore, he is hedging his bets. He wants to give people a taste of what is to come but at the same time, he wants to project phones as an extension but not a replacement of a portable music player. He’s consequently hoping to discomfort Apple’s competition with a cell phone that has nothing but iTunes going for it.

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