skywalker said:
What non-Cingular ROKR's? No other carrier in the US has it, and I've never heard of worldwide releases, but it stands to reason that any other carriers would think the same way. It's still rather immaterial given the rest of my post.
jW
From memory the original ROKR announcement was a worldwide one with operators across the world involved. In any case, how hard is it to Google a few international operator names with "ROKR"? T-Mobile UK and Vodafone, the only two I tried, are clearly selling it. Why on earth would you think that such a high profile quad-band GSM phone would only be sold in the US? Even the Wikipedia has an (incomplete) list of operators. Interesting, Cingular's not one of them, it discontinued the phone a while ago.
FWIW, and I'm about to address the actual "100 song limit"'s source directly, the logic proposed as to why the operators wouldn't want more than 100 songs doesn't make much sense. Few operators actually have online music services (beyond ringtones), and in any case, none would be stupid enough to believe that putting a 100 song limit on the phones would do anything other than to damage such a store. They expect consumers to want to spend money on packet data downloading music and then throw it away to make space for another expensive song? Nobody would buy music from them, ever!
That's not to say operators didn't want limits, but the number of songs wasn't one of them. My guess is most operators would have liked the ROKR to at least have the ability to download music. That, funnily enough, is something the ROKR never had.
The bottom line in any case is that the ROKR's 100 song limit is
exclusively an iTunes/Apple imposed one. Everyone directly involved says this was an Apple decision that Motorola didn't fight hard enough. Given Apple's concerns about cannibalized iPod sales, it does make sense, but if the phone is going to be the future of MP3 playing anyway, Apple can - and will - change that attitude. But not until the time is right.
