[JakeT]

I've had problems with recent Motorola GSM phones droping calls. While additional features are nice, make calls is the most important feature of a phone. I think they could also come up with a better phone book. I would also like to know why the cell phone's caller id doesn't tell me the person's name like it does on my home phone?
They also couldn't keep up with Intel's microprocessors.

[horvatic]

People are going to want devices that do more than just play music.
NO! They buy an mp3 player to play music and that's what it does.

[boomw]

Infoworld:
http://www.infoworld...HNzander_1.html
B.

[Nobody]

Totally agreed! People want devices dedicated to performing each job perfectly to a superior level. This is what Steve Jobs has been saying about convergence - the one size fits all approach is always going to produce lower quality results and complex interfaces!

[warlock7]

Or if your idiot is behaving the way the first idiot tells him to.

[Nobody]

Motorola obviously has had trouble in the past, and that the CEO shouts negatively about Apple's product may be a sign of frustration. The Moto board of trustees may not look at their chief executive the same way again after this. Headhunters for Zander anyone?

[Nobody]

. . . and that should make them both idiots? /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[chasesequence]

"The one size fits all approach is always going to produce lower quality results and complex interfaces!"
That's not necessarily true. Motorola just has [filtered] indutrial designers.
If you built a touchscreen LCD where the touch wheel of an iPod or the numbers of a phone would be, you could easily make a phone that retained the familiar, straightforward interface of an iPod. Tap of a "button" and it changes from a phone to an iPod. Yay.
Talking in absolutes about technology is usually a bad idea.
I hate it when people make absolute pronouncement of the desires of consumers -- such as how "we" (all of us) don't want music player/phone hybrids. Speak for yourselves! Some of us don't want to carry around two, three, four gadgets all day.
Me, I would love to have a phone that functioned as a MP3 player and digital voice recorder -- and preferrably one that folded out into a full keyboard. I'm fairly sure they exist, from what I've seen, they just don't make them good enough for my needs... right now.

[Mississauga]

With the "screw the nano" comment in mind, I'll wait for a Samsung phone that plays iTunes! What a ridiculous comment from an Apple "partner". /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif ... Motorola is off my list.

[pcharles]

I just walked through campus to a meeting and saw a lot of people wearing Apple earbuds and a few even holding their iPods and iPod Mini's. I doubt if I will be seeing many ROKR phones because we cannot get the service up here in Houghton.
I have to wonder if people will miss the iPod Mini, but I am sure people will gravitate toward the Nano because of its cool factor. Even my wife wants one.

[leefa61]

Zander is dumb and so are those retarded phones that never work correctly. i have never had a properly working motocrap, i prefer sanyo, LG, and Treos over zander's phones, and the only reason people are buying the ROKR is because it is integrated with Apple's iTunes. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif

[lkalliance]

Well, this is pretty interesting, and some interesting topics coming up as a result.
Firstly, on Ed Zander's quote, I'm prepared to take it as purely spin. Despite how much fun it is to cite stupidity on the part of CEOs, I don't think it's fair or often warranted. I'm sure Ed Zander knows about the popularity of the iPod, and I'm sure he was simply firing a PR shot across Apple's bow. It may have been a hamfisted shot, and it may certainly reflect poorly on his judgement, but I don't think anyone in the tech industry is blind to the iPod's popularity.
But let's look at the market and ask some questions. This is about aggregates, and not about individuals. A given individual can have excellent reasons for wanting a larger-sized MP3 player, but that does not necessarily translate into a reason that the entire market wants to go that way (witness all the iPod competitors and their larger number of features). What I'm curious about is this:
Until about a year ago, consumers did not have a choice of iPod model outside of hard drive size on the full-sized iPod. Since then they've had the mini/nano, and the Shuffle. The mini is widely regarded as having been the most popular iPod. But the Shuffle is only a few months old. How is it doing in comparison to the full-sized iPod? How will the nano do? The full-sized iPod has capabilities the smaller ones do not, though they are tangential to the prime purpose of playing music. Might a case be made that people DON'T really want or need more than a gig?
From what I read, it sounds like the 4GB nano is more popular than the 2GB nano. From that anecdotal evidence, it would seem like Ed Zander is off base: that the extra space does make a difference to consumers as a whole. But that's not the complete story yet. Is the nano as popular as the mini? Is it as popular as the full-sized iPod? Is either as popular as the Shuffle? (That last one isn't a fair comparison, because of the Shuffle's lack of screen. There is a definitive feature difference there.)
Anyway, though I suspect that Zander's claim is incorrect, I'm not ready to definitively state it's wrong. Sales will be the best (though imperfect) way to determine that. I, for one, have about 1500 songs in my library, but I really only listen to about 100-200 of those songs a lot more often than the others. But I'm just one person. Where am I on the bell curve of users? Sales will tell.
There are claims on this thread that people WANT an MP3 player separate from their phone, that they want separate, optimized devices for each function. I don't think we can definitively say that until there is a combo device that does both functions well. I rather believe that ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, consumers would rather carry one device than two. All other things include sound quality, usability, and price. We don't have that yet.
But this actually circles back to the prior issue...we sorta DO have that device now: the ROKR. I've read a few reviews of the ROKR and there seems to be little debate that the playback quality is comparable to an iPod, the interface is nothing special but tolerable depending on how demanding you are, and that it's a pretty decent phone all things considered. For $249 you're spending about as much as you would on either a higher-end phone or on a nano or full-sized iPod -- plus a camera, more on that below -- and you're getting it all in one package. For all the citations of complaints about Motorola phones, the fact remains that Motorola sells a lot of phones, so I'm inclined to consider company history a non-issue in the aggregate. The biggest complaint seems to be the artificial limit on the number of songs. So this does circle back to Ed Zander's quote. Time will tell.
I don't think it's correct to compare the ROKR to a camera phone. Unlike camera phones, MP3 phones represent two technologies that are really very closely tied together in usage:
--Listening to music and talking on the phone are activities that share the same sensory input. They are generally mutually exclusive, too: you're either listening to music or having a conversation, but generally you don't do both at the same time. So a single device that manages both processes has great potential. If I'm listening to my iPod now (or, for that matter, iTunes) and I get a phone call, I have to turn off one and answer the other.
I actually appreciate that functionality in iChat: if I'm listening to iTunes and I send or receive a video or audio chat invite, iTunes pauses automatically. It restarts automatically, too, when I'm done. I think the ROKR television commercials capture this brilliantly.
--The technologies have synergy. If you improve the sound output on the phone, you're improving BOTH experiences at once.

The point is, that the device is morphing from a telephone or an MP3 player into something that actually describes both but is not too general: a device that manages audio input into your ear. Such a device has a good chance at being optimized for all of its common uses at once.
The comparison with camera phones is not a good one. Shooting pictures and talking on the phone aren't closely linked in that way. Those kinds of combo devices seem to be simply a matter of convenience (carrying one less gadget). But the technologies are only mildly complementary, and don't feed off of each other. Take a phone with a crappy camera and improve the phone and the camera is still crappy. There is no obvious synergy.
But there MIGHT EVENTUALLY be synergy. Look, I'm not going to grab a camera phone when I want to take a nice picture, either. I'm going to grab my SLR. But the camera phone's true strength isn't the ability to TAKE pictures. It's the ability to SEND pictures. In one small device, you can snap that picture and send it to someone. You could do the same thing with a regular camera, only it takes a lot of steps.
The challenge is to create not just a need but a reliance upon that kind of communication. We communicate over distance aurally, not visually. It's worth noting, though, that phone manufacturers aren't the only ones merging sound and pictures: the iPod does it, too. And does it even better, because it actually MERGES the sounds and the pictures!
Anyway, my long-winded point is that the ROKR and whatever comes after has a much better chance of succeeding as a multi-function device, because those functions are so tightly coupled and have a better chance of being optimized as a group. And with that, I think I've run out of gas on this rambling post.

[fribhey]

In reply to:

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Motorola couldn't make a decent phone if their life depended on it, never mind an iPod phone

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i guess it's a good thing motorola has never made an ipod phone.....
let's clear one thing up, it's an ITUNES phone NOT an IPOD phone!.......

[fribhey]

In reply to:

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The problem is, people do want separate devices because the current all-in-ones aren't as good

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i completely disagree.... if everyone wanted an all-in-one then everyone would own DVD-TV combos. the reason why people don't want all-in-ones is because if any of the components break and you have to send it in then you are SOL - no phone, no mp3 and no camera. so if the camera breaks and you have to send it in, you now are left with nothing, even if the other 2 components worked fine.