Motorola ROKR E1 iTunes Phone

Why an iTunes phone instead of software? That’s the valid question asked by The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

By most accounts, the iTunes phone a.k.a. Motorola ROKR E1 is unimpressive : it’s crippled (limited to 100 songs) and other than the iTunes button, it’s really just the same as any other modern mobile phone.

With the iPod (in its various incarnations) taking approximately 50% of the market share of MP3 players, Apple should have gone for the pole position in the growing “music phone” segment as well. To target most of the new smartphones, Apple needs to really develop and release “iTunes Mobile” as software. By just targeting 3 platforms (Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm OS), it could already capture 80% of the existing market.

In fact, Pocket Tunes on the Palm Treo 650 smartphone is already halfway through to being an iTunes phone – just slap on an iTunes skin (and yes, there are a few iTunes skins available) and figure out how to synchronize iTunes on the desktop with the Treo.

According to TUAW, here’s the answer to the question above : “since the wireless networks have been talking about debuting their own wireless download services for phones for a while now, Apple probably wouldn’t have made a whole lot of headway into this mobile phone music market without coming up with something they could sell to both a wireless provider and a hardware manufacturer.”

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Filed under: Mobile World

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