Wow, and I thought I was down on Motorola with its lame ROKR iTunes phones. Bill Palmer of ipodgarage.com has gone way more than simply look at the ROKR and moan about it, he's actually thought - a lot - about why it sucks so much. I wrote recently about the perils of the fabulous brand, in which high-profile products with great brands usually end up donkeys, which ROKR perfectly typified, being a lame candybar phone with an iTunes sticker on it. But Bill has gone even further and fills in the blanks underlying the reasons for the lameness. He starts out neatly describing the disappointment of the ROKR: "So Apple decides to bring an iTunes-compatible cell phone to market. That should be fun to watch, right? But instead we're treated to watching Apple join forces with one of the planet's least-capable companies in Motorola, waiting more than a year for the phone to come to market, and then finding out that aside from its iTunes button, it's just another cell phone. " And then beats up Motorola some more: "Steve [Jobs, Apple CEO] goes to Motorola CEO Ed Zander and convinces him that if Motorola were to make one of its cell phones iTunes-compatible, the phone would sell really well. Nothing more popular than iTunes and the iPod, right? It doesn't even have to be your best model, Steve says. Just stick iTunes into one of your "regular" phones and the sales of that model will skyrocket. And because he has all the business sense of Homer Simpson, Zander jumps at the opportunity. Steve even convinces him to publicly commit to the project by putting out a joint press release announcing the product. Now sure, it takes Motorola a full year to figure out how to add a button with an iTunes logo on it to the top row of one of its existing phones, because that's just how slowly the company functions. " His summary is genius and makes perfect sense, and makes you long for a real Apple iPod phone, made by Apple. Unfortunately, Motorola have said they're going to release a new iTunes phone every quarter or so, including the new RAZR (not the V3X, a new one than that!) so we may have to wait...a long long time! Bugger! Mind you, that's no bad thing for me - looking at the archives, Motorola have given me a lot to write about, and most of it's been a lot of fun! Just glad I never bought a ROKR.