> Excerpts from a NYTimes review - #2 & #5 are the killers for me - maybe
> they'll get it right next time!
Well it is the first generation, a very poor time to buy into such
things. But that's what we get for being ahead of the pack.
> No, the Rokr doesn't have a click wheel; there wouldn't have been room
> on this tiny device, 4.3 by 1.8 by 0.8 inches. Instead, it has a
> five-way nubbin, much like the one on some Palm organizers. Nudging it
> in any direction simulates the functions of the four iPod click-wheel
> buttons. What you lose, of course, is the click wheel's ability to
> cruise through long lists quickly.
One easily acclimates to this, say I.
> No, the phone doesn't contain a hard drive. It comes with a tiny,
> 512-megabyte TransFlash memory card. Incredibly, though, you can only
> store 100 songs on the phone, tops, no matter how much room is left on
> the card. [...]
100 songs are 512 meg in tunes is still 4 hours or something. It works
for me. Some people use an iPod as a quasi-permanent storage mechanism
with all 500 of their albums. 8 full CD's is enough mp3's/language
courses/podcasts to cover my needs.
If your tunes (or podcats) are quite large you use all 512 meg easily
within the 100-item limitation, by the way.
> No, you can't download songs directly onto the phone. You must load
> music onto the phone from your copy of iTunes 5.0, a sleek new version
> of Apple's free jukebox software for Mac and Windows. [...]
I'm on a mac and so iTunes seems the best librarian for the mechanism
anyway.
> No, you can't use songs as ring tones, at least not the songs you've
> bought from Apple's music store. (You can use ordinary MP3 files as
> ring tones, but loading them onto the phone isn't trivial.) [...]
Depends on your thinkin of "trivial". It took me an hour or so to
figure it out. NOW it's trivial. I can also generate midi files as
ringtones, as well as sound-effects from various mp3's I have of horns
and dogs and cash-registers and such. It's fun.
They didn't mention, then the difficulties of bluetoothing jpegs to
your phone from your computer. Which is more of a pain in the a.s, at
least for me. Again, as with the mp3's, on a Mac one has to lose
resource forks, and any extraneous embedded information: EXIF, ICC
profile or progressive JPEG processing. I'm unsure which it was that I
needed to lose, but I ran it all through GraphicConverter on the Mac to
reframe, and such. When I did, I needed to lose everything before
storing the jpeg to Bluetooth to my phone.
> No, the phone doesn't have a FireWire or U.S.B. 2.0 connector. It
> connects to your Mac or PC with a U.S.B. 1.1 cable. Count on waiting 30
> seconds for each song to transfer (compared with about 10 seconds for
> each album on a regular iPod).
Oh the inconveniences of modern technology. You could be forced to scan
the headlinesin the paper during the excess time! Or eat lunch! :-)

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