Motorola ROKR E1

» see motorola.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the rokr e1 was a cingular product. in september 2005 i was on a turkish gsm operator (turkcell at home, avea on a backup line for a stretch) carrying whatever nokia candybar was around at the time. the rokr launched in the united states behind a us-carrier contract and never came to turkey as a sanctioned carrier handset. the iphone announcement was still 16 months away. the music-phone question was not at the front of mind in 2005 for me. the nokia n-series with its real headphone jack and its mp3 player was already on every turkish twentysomething's belt.

motorola and apple announced the partnership in july 2004, more than a year before the product shipped. the idea was that motorola would build a candybar phone with itunes baked in, apple would license the itunes brand and the apple music ecosystem, and cingular would carry it exclusively in the us. for apple the trade was access to a phone-hardware partner with motorola's gsm scale. for motorola the trade was an apple-branded surface area on a flagship handset.

the september 7 2005 launch event was vintage steve jobs in the sense that the keynote also introduced the ipod nano. the nano was the headline product of that event. the rokr was demoed almost as an afterthought. people who watched the keynote at the time read this as a signal that apple had already moved past the motorola partnership and was treating the rokr as a contractual obligation rather than a strategic bet. ed zander, motorola's ceo, said in interviews afterward that apple had purposely undercut the rokr by launching the nano on the same day.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the cap was the bug everyone remembers. the rokr e1 firmware allowed a maximum of 100 songs to be loaded regardless of how much microsd storage you had installed (the slot accepted up to 1gb at launch, and later cards even larger, but the firmware ignored the additional capacity). a 100-song limit on a phone marketed as a music phone was the kind of constraint that made the device a punchline. the limit was widely understood to be apple's, protecting ipod sales by making sure the rokr could not be a replacement.

reviews were uniformly negative. the itunes sync was slow and the song-loading flow felt awkward compared to the ipod. cingular cut the price from $250 with a two-year contract to $150 within two months of launch, which is the move us carriers make when a device is not moving. motorola followed up in 2006 with the rokr e2 (no apple involvement, no itunes) and then the rokr e8, neither of which mattered as a story.

~ the funny part ~

the rokr's failure became a piece of iphone-prologue mythology in the years after. steve jobs reportedly told colleagues that the rokr experience convinced him apple had to build the phone itself instead of licensing music software to handset makers. the partnership-instead-of-product approach that the rokr represented was the one apple specifically rejected in the iphone development that ran parallel to the rokr's death. the rokr existed long enough to be the negative example everyone inside apple pointed at when arguing for vertical integration.

by june 2007 when the iphone shipped the rokr was already a discontinued product gathering dust on cingular shelves. cingular itself was about to become at&t mobility, and the iphone was about to become the at&t exclusive that replaced the rokr in the music-phone slot. the timing was an end-to-end rotation: the carrier stayed, the hardware partner switched from motorola to apple, and the phone became a touch-screen device with no buttons. everything the rokr was supposed to be, the iphone became without motorola in the picture.

~ the day it died ~

there was no formal discontinuation announcement. the rokr e1 quietly disappeared from cingular's lineup through 2006, with the rokr e2 replacing it in the rokr brand slot. wikipedia's date of discontinuation is "around 2006" without a specific day. the device shipped and was withdrawn fast enough that it never made it into the typical phone-product retirement cycle. it lived long enough to be remembered as the experiment that proved apple needed to make its own phone, then the brand limped on through two more rokr models that nobody remembers.

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