When Apple first announced their partnership with Motorola on an iTunes-equipped phone, a spirit of hope was abroad in some quarters. Apple was obviously leveraging Motorola’s handset technology and connections in the phone industry to create a co-branded phone: the “iPod phone”, as it was then almost universally known, would do for mobile phones what the iPod did for portable music players, injecting some much-needed design sense into a market packed with horrible interfaces and obese feature sets.

It was not to be. The Motorola ROKR turned out to be just another phone, albeit a phone with iTunes on. Sure, it’s another step on the road to what Khaled refers to as “the Digital Swiss Army Knife”, but it’s no more than that—a step. The ROKR raises more questions than it answers.

Why did Apple go down this route, of simply adding iTunes functionality to a phone that is otherwise entirely Motorola’s? Was it never part of the plan to make their own phone? Steve Jobs told the Guardian that Apple were “dipping our toes in the water”, which makes it sound like the ROKR was an experiment, but what were they testing?

The usual argument about the iPhone, as I suppose we’ll have to call it, goes something like this: the iPod dominates the portable music player market because of its manifestly superior interface and brilliant design. Apple are perfectly placed to do the same thing in the mobile phone market, or even go further and create an all-in-one device that does pretty much everything the plethora of portable electronic devices we cart around currently do.

I question the credibility of this claim, not because I doubt Apple’s ability, but because the current mobile scene is a very different place than the portable music landscape at the time when the iPod was first created.

The road to iPod domination

The iPod revolution took advantage of a profound shift in the portable music player market. Since the Walkman, portable music players—whether the medium was cassette, CD or MiniDisc—were designed around playing ten or twelve songs, accessed in series, and the interfaces reflected this. Play, pause, fast-forward, rewind—all were much of a muchness.

With the advent of hard drive-based music players, the market was changed utterly. Now one could have hundreds, even thousands of songs on a single device, with no need to change tapes. Moreover, access was no longer serial; one could skip around the contents of one’s music collection with far more agility than older devices allowed. Lastly, the broad acceptance of the mp3 standard and the proliferation of personal computers gave this new platform a huge potential userbase.

Apple’s attack on the market came on two fronts: the interface, and the beautiful design. The intuitive nature of the wheel, and especially the later click-wheel iterations, has been much praised elsewhere, and for good reason; it’s simply the best out there, a mile ahead of any competing device. Industrial design has always been a strong point of Apple’s, and the iPod is the perfect example of why design isn’t an optional extra, it’s a necessity. The iPod is iconic, in striking white and chrome, well-proportioned with subtle curves and textures.

Talk of two fronts is, in a sense, misleading; what really sets the iPod apart is the unity of form and function. You can play a few games on it, or add contacts or notes; even view photos. But what the iPod really does is play music: it’s a single-function device, and it performs that function superbly.

Phones are different

Speaking blithely of digital Swiss Army Knives is all very well; to make one is quite a different matter. Modern mobile phones perform a large number of tasks, not always well: sending and receiving phone calls and text messages; taking photos; browsing the internet; email. So, let’s say for argument’s sake that Apple was going to make a mobile phone that did all those things, and also played music. What would the problems be?

To begin with, there is a preexisting design paradigm: the 12-button interface. Originally designed to make phone calls easier, given our base-10 numerals, this design has proved remarkably robust, if not a little because of its familiarity. So, what to do? As far as I can see Apple have two choices: augment or modify the 12-button interface, or replace it altogether.

Modification is the most obvious choice, and as we can see from this leaked picture of a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, it’s what companies trying to pack all these functions into one package are currently going for.

Despite this, the latter option isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. When you call someone, do you use the number pad usually? No; you have their number saved, and simply select it from a list. I certainly wouldn’t mind using a click-wheel as a way of scrolling through people’s names. (I don’t mean that Apple could simply port the iPod interface to a phone; I’m simply demonstrating that there are alternatives to the current standard interface.) However, there are fundamental problems with the replacement approach.

Firstly, a phone is going to be rather crippled if you can’t add numbers, manually, without plugging it into a computer. Moreover, one needs this method to be quick and efficient; what if you’re in a club and want to take down someone’s phone number? Scrolling through digits and clicking on the right ones (a potential way to add a number using a click-wheel) just won’t do.

One alternative would be to use local, device-to-device connectivity like Bluetooth to add phone numbers. Just met someone? Search for phones within range, and issue an invitation from your phone to the one that belongs to the person you’re talking to. They then accept the invitation, and voila, contact details are exchanged.

The problem is backwards compatibility, and adding numbers on the fly for phones which are not physically proximate (for example, land lines). It looks like we still need those twelve buttons.

Speculation

Having outlined some of the problems Apple would face if they decided to get into the mobile handset game, here are a few speculations of mine. To begin with, Apple may not even want to get into the mobile phone game. An iTunes-equipped phone may be, to them, simply a way to safeguard their revenue stream and keep their options open. The revenue stream argument isn’t one I find particularly convincing, since the iTunes Music Store is basically a way for Apple to sell iPods, but who knows.

One way that Apple could streamline the phone interface is by having a nice big touchpad screen, as well as some more traditional button controls. They could then employ a ‘virtual’ 12-button interface that only appeared when you had to type in a phone number. The rest of the time, you get a nice big colour screen to… view photos on? Watch videos? The list goes on, but the question of whether the technology is there yet remains. Probably not, I’d judge, or at least not at a low enough price; if it were, I imagine someone would have done it by now.

In conclusion, then, the current mobile phone market is a very different place to the burgeoning portable HDD/mp3 player market Apple stormed onto with the iPod. There are plenty of problems and challenges to be overcome by someone, and a lot of money to be made. Whether that someone turns out to be Apple, we’ll have to wait and see.