Simon’s Blog

In a word? No. Aside from the fact that the phone doesn’t get some important hygiene factors right; the design as a whole isn’t particularly compelling.

The phone’s strongest point is having an iTunes client built-in. That’s a great idea; there are some good things about how this works - in particular the way the client interacts with the iTunes software on a PC. As Steve Jobs said at the launch yesterday, one way to think of the current iTunes mobile client/phone combo is that it gives the phone an iPod Shuffle capability. Of course, with only 100 songs, the need for a great way of navigating the songs on the phone isn’t too important.

Bottom line: I don’t know if an “iPod Shuffle” phone is going to be a huge success given that the rest of the phone seems so mediocre. I suspect it won’t be. Seems like a missed opportunity to me…

… or is it? In its agreement with Motorola, it appears that Apple mandated there be a physical cap on the number of songs that can be stored on the phone - not more than 100 songs. I wonder, therefore, whether this indicates that it’s part of Apple’s strategy to make make the Motorola device not as great as it could be? After all, Apple is a consumer electronics company - the iPod is one of the most popular consumer electronics devices in the world. Why wouldn’t they bring an iPod mobile phone to market themselves and grow their own revenues? Perhaps because they don’t know how to design a mobile phone and bring it to market. So, maybe the point of working with Motorola on this first phone was to: a) learn from Motorola about what’s involved in bringing a mobile phone to market; and b) start building relationships with wireless operators so that there’s a market for an Apple iPod phone.