Technofile: It sounded like the perfect combination. Having taken the music crown from the Walkman, Apple's iPod seemed destined to marry the iPod and the mobile phone, creating a nirvana for mobilistas everywhere.
First of all, Apple needed a partner for this project. The mobile world is far more complex than the MP3 player market, involving wireless standards that would make even Apple chief executive Steve Jobs's head spin.
Motorola, the biggest mobile handset maker in the US, was chosen and in July last year, the announcement made that we would soon see an iPod phone.
Last week, Apple launched an iPod-like mobile - so what's the verdict?
The resulting Motorola ROKR (pronounced rocker, get it?) incorporates the popular iPod music player and includes a camera, Bluetooth, stereo speakers, voice dialling and a reasonable battery life. The phone is also slower than iPods at transferring music as it uses the older version of USB, rather than the fast USB 2.0 standard.
Answer a call and the phone will stop playing. You can also listen to music with the phone facility switched off to conserve battery power.
It comes with an internal 512 MB flash memory card. That's the bad news. Unlike every other iPod, the phone version can hold only 100 songs, hardly worthy of the association with iPod. The phone also lacks a clickwheel, instead employing a small joystick, which is less useful for navigating music. Play, pause, fast forward and rewind are also controlled this way.
The reaction among iPod fans has been mixed. Online message boards have pondered issues to do with the phone's integration with the iTunes software, and even Apple itself seems strangely unenthusiastic about it.
The last time I looked, it had relegated the new phone to a small box underneath a giant photo touting its newest music player, the iPod Nano.
And well it might. The Nano, thinner than a pencil and roughly the size of a business card, uses flash memory instead of a hard drive, so there are no moving parts. It replaces the iPod Mini line, Apple's best-selling version of the iPod.
Although the Nano will cost more per megabyte than the Mini (it comes in two and four-gigabyte versions, retailing at €209 and €259 respectively), clearly Apple thinks it can get away with the move. The colour-screened Nano will also display photos. (The ROKR launches in the UK this month, when pricing will become available.)
As for ROKR, the first buyers in the US are reporting that it works well enough as a music player, if lacking the style and the functionality of the iPod. But the main advantage of the ROKR is that it will synchronise music with Apple's iTunes software and music store, which runs on Windows as well as Macs.
IPod owners will be used to this and those who have tried to get music onto any other mobile phone will be pleasantly surprised. The ROKR also mimics the iPod's screen display - awakened by pushing a button marked with the green iTunes music note logo. You can't download music over a mobile network, as you could with a ringtone, only from the music on your PC.
Ultimately, analysts are speculating that Apple will regard the ROKR as a toe in the water, until it can go it alone and produce its own "iPhone" designed by Apple from the ground up. But that would be at least two years away, even if true.
It's a big step, but with its own mobile, Apple, which really makes its money from hardware, would be able to access a market where 750 million mobiles were sold last year. By contrast, only 57 million digital music players were sold in the same period, according to researchers IDC.
It could work. Apple said last week that it is still free to work with other handset makers and mobile networks.
But which carrier would allow a true iTunes-enabled iPhone on its network, when music and downloads are such a big revenue source for them? For the answers to those questions we'll have to wait a little longer.
