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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices.

Another interesting Apple mobile device "kick": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr

If you go back and see the original launch of the ROKR, though, you can see Steve Jobs barely masking his disgust at what Motorola was able to come up with. IIRC the iPhone was well underway from a product dev perspective when the ROKR shipped, and he knew it was going to kill anything the phone makers could envision.

I had a ROKR. I also had several windows mobile phones. I'd find it hard to believe that Jobs thought the ROKR was what he had to compete with; from a usability perspective, the iPhone didn't come close to windows mobile; it lacked even basic MMS functionality for quite a while.

There were shortcomings, but being able to browse the web and view full sites allowed you to do things with the iPhone in 2007 that were extremely useful. There was no other product like it in terms of usefulness for travel, shopping and general productivity.

Oh Gawd, I remember that. I believe that Apple never had any intention of making that successful, and were planning on backstabbing Motorola no matter how the Rokr turned out.

"Planning"? Apple released the iPod Nano the same day the Rockr was announced. Mid-level candy bar phone with not much capacity to store said "tunes", or a cute little music player with 2-4 times what the Rockr would hold? The Rockr seemed to me to be one of those products that was only released because of inertia. Or released because Apple blind-sided Motorola with that announcement and, "well, the ad spend is already spent, so..."

I'm pretty sure the Rokr had an artificial cap of 100 songs for whatever reason.

Rokr had nothing to do with Apple. Motorola just licensed iTunes compatibility. That was not Apple's device.

I always saw it testing a business relationship with the cellular industry rather than any serious effort. The iPhone wasn't successful in a vacuum; Apple Stores, relationship to a carrier, deployment of iTunes all contributed to getting traction. I'm sure Rokr had more influence than Knowledge navigator did.

Very insightful!

> Rokr had nothing to do with Apple.

Incorrect. The Rokr E1 was how Apple built the relationship with AT&T, a test which ultimately resulted in the iPhone launch happening on AT&T.

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