Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's handheld consumer-generated media studio yesterday, the Rokr. Now you can snap/upload pictures, download podcasts, phone in or text a blog post---all from one device.
The New York Times has a slideshow with more details.
But what I love most about the announcement and follow-up press is how the Nano is getting most of the coverage. 
It's clear that Apple's iPod cellphone buzz prior to the announcement impacted the launch. Luckily Apple had the Nano, a wicked tiny iPod, up its sleeve. Regardless, the convergence of these hand-held electronics makes the wired consumer even more influential in the blogosphere.
UPDATE: Business 2.0's blog brings us this prediction from Piper Jaffrey: "we believe there is a greater than 50% chance in the next 18 months that Apple comes out with their own Apple phone. This is different than the highly anticipated Motorola Rokr phone which is due out later this month. This phone would be branded as an Apple phone, and would combine an iPod and a cell phone. We are referring to this phone as the iPhone.
"Reasons why we believe Apple will do its own phone. The logical long term threat to the iPod is the cell phone. It's logical for Apple to turn this threat into an opportunity. The phone market is 13x bigger than the mp3 player market. If you go to www.iphone.org, it takes you to the Apple website."
According to a commenter on this post, this rumor is more than a year old.
tags: iPod, Rokr, Nano, Al Roker, consumer generated media, blog
They choked with this. 100 songs is very lame.
Posted by: J | Thursday, September 08, 2005 at 06:23 PM
Good to hear from you J.
100 songs may be lame, but they were probably just trying to get the product out on the market...get/keep their foot in the door.
As fast as they followed up with iPods with more memory, iPod mini then shuffle, they'll be coming out with Rokr 2.0 pretty quickly I suspect.
Posted by: Kevin Dugan | Thursday, September 08, 2005 at 07:29 PM
the thing is, this functionality isn't new. you can go get a windows mobile smartphone from cingular (like the audiovox smt 5600), put in a gig of memory for only $80 and have 3 times the storage. and the media player on is fantastic (supports album art, playlists from your computer etc.)
why will the ROKR be more successful? marketing/advertising. apple is good at communicating the value of their products in an experential manner - people get what they are about.
Posted by: joshk | Tuesday, September 20, 2005 at 01:39 PM
Now that's what I call a very sexy phone. I'd wish there'll be more Swiss Army Knives that are sexy as that. I bet men will be more enamored to them.
Posted by: Shawn | Sunday, June 10, 2007 at 06:37 AM