Further thoughts on ROKR...

After digesting a few reviews on the ROKR including:
the ipodlounge crew
and from Charles Arthur at the
Indie

I've come to the conclusion it's a big disappointment indeed.

ipodlounge has covered a lot of issues with it. I had previously thought that the iTunes integration would be enough to make it a real contender for someone who wanted a simple candy-bar style phone with music. But really a VGA camera, triband only, USB 1.x for really slow downloads, etc are not at all compelling. There are also obvious bugs with it, which after a year in gestation is just not good enough.

As Charles points out in his blog, does it really matter to Apple? Taking a more cynical line was the introduction of the nano specifically timed to defuse the criticism of Apple with this release? Given Paris MacExpo show keynote was cancelled (plan A?), I wonder if Apple decided they had enough inventory of these devices to announce the phone and nano together. The world would focus on the nano and forgive Apple for it's (relatively small) role on the ROKR. Indeed, given the ingeniousness of the nano, Apple has showed that in fact there isn't necessarily a need for convergence after all if you can create a device that is so small as to be invisible.

It's just given the iPod another year or two until a convergent device can get it right!