Saturday, March 04, 2006

On Moto's SLVR and ROKR Phones...

I just couldn't help pass this up. I'm sure a lot of people must know about Motorola's two main iTunes supporting cell phones - the (earlier) ROKR and the (latest) SLVR L7. These are, no doubt, very cool phones and a we get to see a lot of reviews, articles and blogs about 'em. But, there are a couple things that upset me. A major portion of the articles written seem to criticize Motorola for setting the song limit on iTunes at a 100 songs. The original ROKR didn't take off as well as expected (atleast no where close to the super successful RAZR), and I think the reason for this was because, the iPod Nano and other iPod releases coincided with it and most people were expecting an iPod and in the process forgot that the ROKR was supposed to be a real good phone with many of the features that most current generation phones support and oh by the way, it also has iTunes. Instead, all the hype (surrounding the iPod releases and roumors of partnership between Motorola and Apple) ended up making people expect exactly the opposite of what was intended - people were expecting the ROKR to be a iPod that is also a phone... well, bad marketing you say? possible.

Even more upsetting than that are the comments being made about the SLVR. I think Moto did an EXCELLENT job with this phone, by bringing the super cool, ground breaking, iconic looks of the RAZR to ardent candy-bar phone fans (myself included!). Most articles I have read are all praises about the looks, the form factor and other advanced features of the phone. But, for some reason, a major proportion of articles can't help sneaking in the fact (usually at the end of the articles) that the phone (SLVR) still has the same 100 song limit. What upsets me, is that do these people ever stop to think that maybe this is because of a business agreement between Motorola and Apple? (Note: this is purely a common sense guess and i have no information to support it). I mean, think about it, why would Motorola be so stupid to put the same limit back in the SLVR, when in reality they have made so many other advances in technology (like USB charging, removable/ expandable memory cards)? Clearly if they could add more memory, allowing more songs couldn't have been much harder. So, maybe this is a restriction Apple imposed, after all (would you buy a iPod if your phone carried, say 500 iTunes and also did an excellent job as a phone?, I don't think so!). That said, it seems like the SLVR's ultra cool looks and affordable price are really doing the trick that the ROKR could not and the phone seems to be selling up to expectation.

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