Tikkabik

One thing that's pretty clear from yesterday's Apple special event -- the ROKR was the weak link in the chain.

Some people are certainly bitching up a storm about iTunes 5, and how it doesn't merit a major upgrade and how they've ruined the interface -- there are critics everywhere, whatever. I kinda like it.

But while folks are, for the most part, impressed with the iPod nano, the ROKR has left them cold. Part of it is the uninspired industrial design. A lot of it is the limit of 100 songs (apparently DRM enforced, surely more fodder for cryptopunks who already hate Apple). But a lot of it has to do with the just plain ass interface that the phone uses to access its songs. It's iPod-like, but really only in respect to its use of hierarchical menus to navigate directories -- there's no Click Wheel, none of the pleasantries iPod users have grown to expect.

It's pretty par for course for phones, though. Just in general, phones are awful devics that are often counterintuitive, contradictory and just plain poorly designed. It doesn't matter whether you're using a cell phone or a land line phone -- chances are that its interface sucks, and that it's about as easy to program as a VCR.

Why?