IT Weekly Thumps iTunes Phone

After today's launch by Apple, the general consensus seemed to be that the over-hyped Rokr phone was nothing special, while the new Apple iPod Nano was going to be a huge hit. This article in IT Weekly take a more critical stance on the iTunes phone.

Ken Dulaney at Gartner said, "[Cingular, Apple and Motorola] have deluded themselves into thinking that this is such a hot product. When people look into the features, they find out that it is not that great. The linkage of the phone to iTunes is the sexy part. But the implementation sounds a little weak to me."

According to the article, the $249.99 price point is too high and Cingular currently only has two handsets - the Treo 650 and the Windows Pocket PC powered Siemens SX66 smart phone with built in Wi-Fi - selling at a higher cost.

"You pretty much collapsed your market right there," added Dulaney, who thought the device aimed at teenagers and children was out of their price range.

The 100 song cap also was a point of contention. Gerry Purdy at Mobiletrax, said "One hundred tunes seems miniscule when the standard minimum today is 1000. If you buy the phone as your primary music player, you'll be disappointed."

The artcle concludes with Dulaney suggesting users "are better off buying a phone that runs Windows Mobile because the they don't limit the number of songs that can be played."

Something about this article bothers me on several levels. Maybe it's the sloppy research and editing or maybe it's just that some of the basic assumptions (i.e. target audience is teens and kids or the minimum size MP3 player is 1000 songs) seem off base when compared to the intended usage model for the Rokr.

Nowhere have I seen the Rokr being positioned as a primary music player or even as an iPod replacement. And although it hasn't met with a resounding thumbs up from analysts, most seemed to note that it was a complementary product for those who wanted to carry some tunes with their phone. Plus 100 tunes never seemed to hurt the appeal of the Shuffle.

I also found Dulaney's comments very interesting. I always thought he was an analyst with a more enterprise focus so to hear him recommend Windows smartphones over the Rokr definitely caught my eye. I have a Audiovox SMT-5600 Windows smartphone and I have transferred songs and video to it. But I wouldn't consider it a music phone nor a video device even though it handles both reasonably well albeit not as easy as an iTunes device.

As noted a couple of weeks ago by Jupiter's Michael Gartenberg and then discussed further by Dan Taylor at the Mobile Enterprise Weblog, for better or for worse smartphones aren't being positioned for their music playing abilities even though they've been on the market for some time now. Hearing an enterprise guy suggest consumers purchase devices that are generally more complex just strikes me as a bit odd...