April Furst: the fake iTunes phone that fooled the internet

Ringback · 2026-08-14

At 7:33 on the evening of March 31, 2005, a blog that had existed for ten days published the phone scoop of the year: "exclusive" photographs of Motorola's endlessly delayed iTunes phone. It was an April Fools' prank, posted a few hours ahead of its holiday. The Mobile Music Blog, a one-writer industry site at this address, revealed a whole product line — a hard-drive model and a smaller-capacity flash model it called the "Shuffle model." The photographs showed a white iPod, and separately an iPod Shuffle, each strapped with two rubber bands to the face of a 1980s brick phone — the kind with a long rigid antenna and, on this one, the logo of PacTel, a carrier brand that had ceased to exist a decade earlier.

The joke was built to be seen through, and it is the reason this address still receives visitors two decades later. The fake iTunes phone was an iPod and some office supplies; the joke's craft was everything around the picture — a fake spokeswoman whose name gave the date away, a press-release parody tuned to the exact frustrations of that spring, and a publication date that landed on both sides of midnight. Within hours, Gizmodo and Boing Boing had linked it; within days, so had blogs writing in Italian and Finnish, with Japanese and Chinese sites following into the summer. Everyone wanted Motorola's iTunes phone to exist. For one morning, at this URL, it did.

"WORLD EXCLUSIVE! FIRST LOOK AT iTUNES PHONE" · The Mobile Music Blog · 2005-03-31, 7:33 PM · /2005/03/world_exclusive.html · category: Devices

The blog itself deserves a sentence of introduction, because its newness is part of the story. The Mobile Music Blog was written by Carlo Longino — then executive editor of the mobile-industry site TheFeature and a former Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal reporter, per the blog's archived about page — and it covered the collision of music and mobile phones as daily trade news: carrier download stores, ringtone economics, DRM fights, and above all the Motorola–Apple saga. Its first posts are dated March 22, 2005. The prank went up on day ten. A brand-new, one-writer trade blog does not usually get a launch week; this one manufactured its own.

The post left every giveaway in plain sight

A good hoax hides its tells; a good April Fools' post plants them. The capture preserved by the Internet Archive shows the post working through the full checklist of a 2005 product story — exclusive images, a two-model lineup, a corporate statement, a non-comment from Apple — and sabotaging every item on it.

The spokeswoman quoted "when asked" about the phones' sudden appearance was named April Furst, and her one attributed line was "it's a little hard to believe, isn't it?" Steve Jobs, the post reported, "didn't return repeated calls for comment" — the era's stock closing line, deployed straight-faced above photographs of an iPod strapped to a dead carrier's handset. The two-model lineup parodied Apple's own catalogue, which in the spring of 2005 ran from the flagship iPod and iPod photo down through the iPod mini to the screenless Shuffle: the fake flagship phone promised the iPod's familiar scroll-wheel interface, the fake budget model the Shuffle's controls — which is to say, the props were an iPod and a Shuffle, and the copy simply described the props. And the post's fake corporate statement had both models "ready to ship in volume immediately," with carrier partners "excited" to sell them and "confident" of their role — the sharpest tell of all for anyone on the beat, because that spring the most-reported reason the real phone kept not shipping was that the carriers had yet to sign off.

The post closed by crediting Eric Lin of the handset site Phone Scoop, noting that his site had scoops of its own that day — a wink pointing readers at more of the same holiday. Whatever Phone Scoop actually ran that morning is one of the few parts of this story the record no longer holds: the Internet Archive has no capture of phonescoop.com between March 25 and April 15, 2005.

By April 1, 2005, the iTunes phone was the most anticipated no-show in tech

The prank's real ingredient was timing. On July 26, 2004, Apple and Motorola had announced — in a press release still on Apple's site — that Apple would build an iTunes player for Motorola's "next-generation" mass-market phones, moving songs bought from the iTunes Music Store · opened 2003 over USB or Bluetooth, with handsets expected in the first half of 2005. Steve Jobs's quote in that release sized the prize at 1.5 billion mobile subscribers by year's end. Bullish comments from Motorola management before Christmas, The Register later noted, had raised expectations the handset would ship sooner rather than later. Eight months after the announcement there was no phone, and the delay had become a story in its own right — a rolling serial of scrubbed appearances that the trade press covered the way entertainment reporters cover a troubled film.

In March 2005 the phone missed CeBIT, the industry's big European show, even as Motorola's stand there promoted iTunes downloads. The Register reported on March 10 that a Motorola source at the show said the handset would launch when the carriers gave their approval — and that in a business leaving pennies for everyone but the rights holders, the carriers' cut of any download revenue would be "keenly fought over." A phone that filled itself from a PC for $0.99 a song offered them neither a launch they controlled nor a cut. Six days later, at a CTIA press conference, Motorola's mobile-phone chief Ron Garriques blamed Apple's theatrics instead: "Steve's perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday," he said, in remarks reported by Reuters and quoted by The Register. Whoever was right — that fight gets its own article — the public fact on April Fools' morning was that the most-discussed phone in the world had missed every teased appearance, and the explanations on record blamed each other.

The Mobile Music Blog knew the saga cold: in its first ten days it had already run posts titled "iTunes Phone Delay — The Plot Thickens" and "Hello Moto?", per the archived March 2005 index. A hoax is a demand signal, and this one was calibrated by a specialist. The prank did not invent an appetite; it measured one. Readers who had waited eight months for this exact headline clicked before they looked at the antenna.

Thirty-one trackbacks preserve exactly who took the bait

Reception histories from the blog era are usually guesswork, because traffic logs die with their sites. This one is an exception, thanks to a TypePad-era mechanism: trackbacks, the automated notices a blog received when another blog linked it. The Internet Archive's December 30, 2005 capture of the prank's April URL preserves the full ledger — 31 trackbacks and 20 reader comments, each timestamped.

31 trackbacks · 20 comments · /2005/04/world_exclusive.html · Internet Archive capture 2005-12-30

The log reads as a two-hour diffusion study. Gizmodo's entry, titled "0401: iTunes Phone," arrived at 9:33 a.m. — two hours to the minute after the re-dated post's timestamp. Boing Boing followed at 11:09 a.m. with "Motorola's iTunes phone revealed," in which co-editor David Pescovitz — a friend of the blog's author, Carlo Longino — announced that he himself "got punk'd," after a week of hearing Longino brag that Motorola PR had given him the first look. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Buzzworthy blog filed the post under "Mind the Date Edition" at 11:24; the German-based vowe.net linked it at 11:44; a UK tech blog announced "The iPod phone is Here!" at 1:31 that afternoon. Several entries in the log are themselves April Fools' inventories — round-up posts cataloguing the day's fakes, in which the iTunes phone sits alongside Google's joke products — which is its own measure of how quickly the post entered the holiday's canon. The ringtone-trade site Ringtonia tracked back twice on April 2; the group blog Making Light filed it on April 4 in a round-up titled "A day for fine notions," alongside Google Gulp.

Then the joke went multilingual, and long. An Italian round-up of the day's absurdities arrived that afternoon, a Finnish Apple blog the next morning, Japanese diary sites into June, two Chinese iPod round-ups in May and June, and on May 23 the Guardian's Onlineblog, linking the prank while discussing a Wall Street Journal piece on why music phones would not be the iPod-killers some expected. The final trackback is dated November 30, 2005 — eight months of afterlife for a one-day joke, recorded to the second by machinery that no longer exists on the modern web.

The comments run the full April 1 spectrum: mock outrage at Motorola for the "leak," congratulations on the gag, one reader asking "Where can I buy one?", another demanding to know, in capital letters, why the phones were so big. No visitor count survives — the blog's traffic numbers died with it, and the trackback ledger is the best proxy the record offers — but 31 inbound links in a capture of a single post, on a site ten days old, was a reach that, so far as the Archive's captures show, the blog never came near again in the ten months it had left.

Why does one prank answer at two addresses?

Anyone retracing those links today hits a quirk: the prank lived at two URLs at once. TypePad, the blog's platform, filed each post into a monthly directory, and the "world exclusive" exists in the Archive both as a March post and as an April one — same title, same text, same photographs, timestamps exactly twelve hours apart.

/2005/03/world_exclusive.html · posted 2005-03-31, 7:33 PM · /2005/04/world_exclusive.html · posted 2005-04-01, 7:33 AM

The observable facts: the post went up on the evening of March 31 under the March path, and appears re-dated to the morning of April 1 under the April path, which is the copy that accumulated the trackbacks and comments. Whether the re-dating was a deliberate flourish — a joke filed the night before, moved to land on the correct holiday — the record does not say, though a shift of precisely twelve hours suggests a hand on the clock rather than an accident of software. What is certain is that both URLs kept serving the page for the rest of the blog's life, and both got linked: the Archive's index shows the March path returning 200s until at least January 18, 2006, and the April path until February 8, 2006, with first archived 404s on February 12 and 13 — days after the blog's February 2, 2006 sign-off post. Two decades on, both legacy paths still carry inbound links from 2005, which is why they both resolve to this article.

The double URL also explains a small oddity of the prank's link archaeology: some of the sites that linked the joke pointed at the March path and others at the April one, and because both versions kept answering for the rest of the blog's life, the prank's audience is split across two addresses in every index that still remembers it. For a history publication that now answers at both, the split is useful — it preserves, in the URLs themselves, the fact that the same joke was filed under two dates.

The prank got three things right by accident

Read against what actually happened, the joke holds up as forecasting. First, the two-model line: Motorola really did ship iTunes on two handsets — the ROKR E1 in September 2005 ROKR/iTunes · 2005–2006, then the thinner SLVR L7 in January 2006, at $199 on a two-year Cingular contract, per period Engadget coverage. Second, the carrier friction its fake spokeswoman protested too much about: the reporting that spring, and everything after, confirmed that the operators' resistance was the story — the question of who actually killed the iTunes phone has its own article here. Third, and most precisely, the premise itself. A music player crudely bolted to a phone, neither device improved by the union, is a fair engineering diagram of what shipped.

The real iTunes phone did not do much better

The genuine article arrived on September 7, 2005, five months after the prank: the Motorola ROKR E1, "the world's first mobile phone with iTunes," in the words of Apple's launch release, at $249.99 with a two-year Cingular commitment, holding — by design — no more than 100 songs. At the same San Francisco event, Apple introduced the iPod nano: $199 for a 2 GB model holding 500 songs, $249 for 4 GB holding 1,000. In the launch release, Jobs promised "the world's best music experience on a mobile phone"; the spec sheet put that experience at a tenth the capacity of the $249 player announced in the same hour. The SLVR L7 that followed in January 2006 kept the same 100-song cap. The line went no further, and the full anatomy of its failure — the cap, the USB 1.1 syncing, the cleared stock — is the next article's subject.

Which leaves the brick phone. The prank's hardware was honest about its era in a way the real product never managed: it took the best music player in the world and the most obsolete handset it could find, bound them together, and let the seams show. The shipping ROKR made the same joint out of firmware — an iPod grafted onto an aging phone, with the rubber bands negotiated into the software as a 100-song limit. Of the two iTunes phones published in 2005, the one from April 1 was the more accurate diagram of the industry that built it — and it was the only one anybody ever begged to buy.