bkknight369

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...w=wn_tophead_2

One sign that the ROKR, the new iTunes phone from Motorola, might not live up to expectations came during its September unveiling ceremony at San Francisco's Moscone Center. In the midst of an elaborate presentation of new products, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, faltered in his onstage demonstration of one of the ROKR's most crucial features: effortless switching from MP3 player to phone and back again. After taking a call from a colleague, he went back to … nothing. Silence. "Well," he said, looking perplexed, "I'm supposed to be able to resume the music right back to where it was. …" Then: "Oops! I hit the wrong button." Maybe not the ROKR's fault, but since Jobs' presentations are usually flawless, certainly not a good omen.

When Jobs and Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola, announced 15 months ago that the two companies were going to partner on a new phone, people imagined a hybrid of two of the coolest products in existence: Apple's iPod and Moto's RAZR. For months the new gizmo glimmered mirage-like on gadget sites - ever promised, never delivered. When it finally did show up, it bore the unmistakable hump of a committee camel. Not sleek like an iPod, not slim like a RAZR - and when you saw the fine print, you discovered that you can't use it to buy music over the airwaves, that it's painfully slow at loading songs from iTunes on your computer, and that it comes pre-hobbled with a 100-song limit. No matter how much of its 512 megabytes of flash memory you have left, you can't load any more tracks onto the thing. The consensus: disappointing.

What should a music phone offer? The specs aren't hard to figure out. For starters, it should have clearly marked Pause and Play buttons so as not to trip up people like Steve Jobs. It should sync quickly and easily with your computer, and you should be able to use it to buy music at a reasonable price. It should play music from iTunes or any other music service. You should be able to choose different amounts of memory, and whatever you decide on, it shouldn't be constrained to 100 songs - or any other arbitrary limit.

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. Put it all together and you get - the ROKR? How does a great idea get this botched?

The ROKR was conceived in January 2004, shortly after Ed Zander became head of Motorola. As a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and, before that, president of Sun Microsystems, Zander had known Jobs for years. So when Jobs called to congratulate him on his new position, it was only natural to discuss how they might work together.

Each had his reasons. Zander had been hired to jazz up the staid midwestern company, and an association with iPod would provide a much-needed infusion of cool - maybe even more than the upcoming RAZR. For Jobs, a partnership with Motorola was a way of neutralizing a threat to the iPod, which already dominated the US music-player market. Consumers around the world are expected to buy 75 million MP3 players this year, but they'll purchase nearly 10 times that many mobile phones. If music players become standard in handsets, the iPod could be in trouble. Partnering on a music phone gives Apple a way to enter that market yet protect the iPod. So although the two companies were superficially aligned, in fact their ambitions were diametrically opposed: Motorola dreamed of bringing the iPod to the cell phone-buying masses, while Apple sought to protect the iPod from them.

Thus conflicted, they set to work. Motorola already had a hardware prototype - the so-called MTV phone, which had launched two years before in association with the music channel in Europe, Asia, and South America. Engineers at Motorola's handset division in the Chicago suburbs started working with Apple's applications team in Silicon Valley to adapt the iTunes software. They had to deal with situations iTunes hadn't been designed for, like how to handle a text message and what to do when a call comes in while music is playing. They logged a lot of airline miles.

The Motorola team soon discovered that working with Apple means making compromises. A key part of the iTunes package, for example, is FairPlay, Apple's digital rights management software. Ostensibly, DRM exists to benefit the music companies, but it's an equally handy control mechanism for the tech outfits that develop it - companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Apple. FairPlay would set limits on the new phone: It couldn't play music from any major online store but iTunes. It couldn't hold more than 100 songs. "It's obvious why Apple is doing this," says Patrick Parodi, head of the Mobile Entertainment Forum, an industry trade group. "They don't want to cannibalize the iPod."

Once Apple and Motorola came up with a product, they would need to partner with at least one major wireless operator to get it distributed. This was critical, particularly in the US, where carriers so dominate the distribution channels that only 0.5 percent of handsets are sold independently. Meetings were scheduled with some of the world's largest carriers - Vodafone, Telefonica, Orange, Cingular. But they were bound to object to the handset Moto and Apple were offering, for any number of reasons.

For a carrier, the whole point of putting music on a cell phone is to make money on data traffic from songs downloaded wirelessly. Carriers also like to make money handling the billing for those downloads. Yet the ROKR puts Apple's iTunes in charge. The only way to load music onto the phone is to sync it with your computer; to buy new music, you have to access the iTunes store through your computer, bypassing the carrier's network and billing service. Even worse from the carriers' point of view, iTunes would compete with the music stores they themselves are setting up. Never mind that iTunes has far more name recognition than a carrier's brand could ever hope to achieve, and thus would lure new subscribers. For companies that live off their monopoly on spectrum, it's hard to view competition as good.

dallison

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