Ever heard of a Motorola cell phone with iTunes?
February 18, 2010 Post a Comment Friday, February 19th, 2010, Netcast 1030 Back to Dick’s Gadget Warehouse
It was back in September 2005 when I was invited to a huge disco/nightclub called Webster Hall for a ‘major announcement’ from Motorola. The rumors were rampant that the announcement would be that Motorola would be introducing new an iTunes capable cell phone. Hmm, I never recalled up to that point that Apple really liked to work with outside companies, so I had a ‘wait & see’ attitude. With music blaring and DJ’s playing we were introduced to the Motorola ROKR E1. (ROKR as in Rocker.) Yes, the rumors were true. You could use it with iTunes, but so it wasn’t too much like an iPod, there was a tune limit. You could only transfer 100 of your favorite songs from the iTunes jukebox on a Mac or PC to the ROKR. Another not too exciting announcement was that this new phone was exclusively available with Cingular service. (Now ATT.) The Motorola ROKR had a color display for viewing album art, dual built-in stereo speakers (which sounded very decent) and stereo headphones that doubled as a mobile headset with microphone. But there was another musical drawback to the ROKR. Although you could now use a version of iTunes on this phone, you could not listen to your music library via Bluetooth stereo headphones. No protocol to do that was included, and you also needed an adapter to use regular 3.5mm headphones. The cost was $199.99, which was quickly reduced to $149.99, which didn’t seem to help much. The phone was available for about a year before it disappeared.
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