Motorola's Zander: ROKR missed the mark

In this article at Bloomberg, Motorola Chief Executive Officer Ed Zander admits that the ROKR iTunes phone has "...[gotten] off to a little bit of a rough start." While Motorola sold 250,000 ROKR phones last quarter, they are being returned by customers at a rate of nearly six times the typical statistics for a new phone. Zander blames, in part, the phone's marketing:

"People were looking for an iPod and that's not what it is. We may have missed the marketing message there." Shoppers were quick to notice that, at a price point of $249.99US, it holds 100 songs vs. the iPod nano's 1,000 song capacity for the same price.

So what does all this mean? Steve did seem rather half-hearted when he introduced the ROKR in September, yet he recently said that "There are more phones yet to roll out." Personally, I don't see the point of carrying an iPod and a phone that acts like an iPod. We'll see where this goes.