It was a pretty exciting week in San Francisco as Apple unveiled the iPod nano and the Motorola ROKR (a.k.a the iTunes phone). The nano has been an incredible device and worked exactly as you would expect it to — unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the ROKR.
I had one of the first ROKR phones sold from the downtown San Francisco Cingular location and couldn’t wait to get back to the office and see how it worked with my Mac. It wasn’t long before my excitement turned to frustration and anger as I struggled to get the ROKR recognized by my Mac and iTunes.
When first plugging the phone into my PowerBook, iTunes popped open as expected, but nothing else happened. The ROKR was lost somewhere between the cable and my iTunes application.
I had already downloaded and installed iTunes 5, so it should have been just a matter of plugging the phone in and transferring songs. I wish it were that easy.
I spent the next couple of hours troubleshooting the problem. I reinstalled iTunes 5, tried the phone on different Macs in the office and we even tried it on a Windows machine with the newest version of iTunes but nothing worked — my ROKR doesn’t rock.
People on Apple’s own message boards are having the same problem as I have with their ROKR phones, so it’s not just an issue of my phone. Various fixes have been suggested in the last 24 hours and I have tried them all, but to no avail.
An updated software driver has even appeared on some users systems, but I haven’t seen it on my software update.
I was looking forward to posting my thoughts on actually using the first iTunes enabled phone, but unfortunately I haven’t even been able to get past the first step. My ROKR has been returned — hopefully if I do try it again, I’ll have a much better experience.