Michael Singer, Scott Ard and Leslie Katz
Ending months of fervent speculation, Apple on Wednesday rolled out a mobile phone capable of playing music and accessing iTunes.
The company also announced a tiny new iPod that can hold 1,000 songs and is thinner than a standard pencil, according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
At an invitation-only event for journalists and others in San Francisco, beamed by satellite to press events around the world, Jobs and Motorola CEO Ed Zander rolled out the Rokr (that's 'rocker', intentionally misspelt). The introduction of the product had been expected since July 2004, when Motorola and Apple announced plans to collaborate on a music-capable phone.
"Today the talk ends and the music begins," said Ralph de la Vega, chief operating officer at Cingular, which will be the exclusive US carrier of the phone.
The Rokr, which will be available starting this weekend, can hold around 100 songs. It has a colour display for viewing album art and features built-in dual-stereo speakers, as well as stereo headphones that also serve as a mobile headset with microphones.
Also on Wednesday, Apple announced a new iPod, the iPod nano: "A thousand songs in your pocket and impossibly small," Jobs said. It's "thinner than a number two pencil," he said to oohs and aahs from the audience. "The iPod nano is 80 per cent smaller than the original iPod."
The iPod nano comes in two models -- the 4GB nano holds up to 1,000 songs and the 2GB model takes up to 500 songs. They cost £179 and £139 respectively and are available now from Apple's online store."iPod nano is the biggest revolution since the original iPod," Jobs added. "iPod nano is a full-featured iPod in an impossibly small size, and it's going to change the rules for the entire portable music market."
The iPod nano features the same 30-pin dock connector as the iPod and iPod Mini, which it replaces, allowing it to work with a wide range of more than 1,000 accessories developed for iPod, including home stereo speakers and iPod car adapters.
The Rokr phone and iPod nano represent two attempts by Apple to extend the enormous popularity of its iPod into a vast new market.
Apple said it sold nearly 6.2 million iPods between April and June of this year, representing 616 per cent growth in iPod sales compared with the same time last year. Revenues totalled just $249,000 but included the introduction of the flash-based iPod Shuffle, which sells in the UK for just £79.iPod sales have propelled Apple into a lead market position, with a 53 per cent share of all digital-music players, according to a report released on Tuesday by Solutions Research Group. Sony and RCA tied for a distant second with 9 per cent share each.
Apple's success has had a tremendous ripple effect on the digital-music player industry. D&M Holdings, which makes the Rio music player, said last month that it is shutting down its portable digital-audio division, in part because of competitive business dominated by Apple.
Despite Apple's steps into the mobile-phone music player space, analysts are mixed on its effect on the iPod generation.
"I see the move as largely defensive," said Roger Kay, president and chief analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates. "A mobile phone is not the optimal device for listening to music. Among other things, you need two headsets, one for phone (one ear, with mike) and one for music (stereo phones, no mike)."
Kay said Apple should be concerned, however, that handset makers and network providers might try to bypass the need to work with Apple's iPod hardware, given that mobile phones are exceptionally popular.
Gartner analysts estimate 780 million handsets will be sold this year alone with 1 billion mobile phones sold every year by 2009.
Other analysts, such as Tim Deal of Technology Business Research (TBR), say that Apple's move into the mobile phone market is a natural evolution of not only its iPod strategy but its iTunes store as well.
"The pervasiveness of mobile phones in the world makes sense that there should be a relationship of these phones and iTunes," Deal said.
Motorola is also banking on more sales of its handsets with Apple as a partner. Garner currently ranks Motorola as the number two seller of mobile phones behind Nokia, which recently released its own N91 handset in the US. The music player comes with a colour screen, a camera and has 4GB of storage that can hold more than 1,000 songs. Samsung's SGH-E720 and Sony's Walkman W800i are similar to Motorola's Rokr.
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