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Then take it back under your bridge and listen to it.

Well Apple is the market leader in Europe, as it is in most other countries. What about their "idea of DRM"?. Also how does that tie in with your "open source" comment?

I'm a multiple iPod owner and love them, however I dislike this type of rhetoric. It's shallow. Read up on capitalism and and accept that it's the business model they've adopted. I don't believe it's a matter or right or wrong, winners or losers.

Apple doesn't have DRM?

Lastly, when the new Zune marketplace opens with the release of the new hardware over 1/3 of the 3 millions songs will be DRM FREE.

16GB flash is too expensive at the moment for mass production.

That's interesting. Why would it be more expensive than 80GB?

The 4 & 8GB versions are flash, the 30 and 80GB versions use hard drives. If they made a 16GB version (as with the iPod) it would most likely be flash, and cost roughly the same as the 80GB hard drive version.

80GB is HDD based.

Gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up for me

The 200usd Sandisk Sansa with 16gb of flash and wifi is not too expensive in my eyes

That's sandisks main area of electronics, flash base. They can produce/manufacture this stuff themselves, hence the cheapness.

You just made R2D2 cry.

Have you actually used a Zune?

The UI is spectacular, and they look great in person. The white one has this kind of translucent effect to it which is overally incredibly pleasing (Which can't be properly captured by photos of it.)

Nothing new? The new zunes and updated firmware for the old zunes allow you to transfer songs to your computer wirelessly. So far the ipods dont have that.

Also the zunes have an fm radio wich the ipods dont. Plus the 80gig zune comes with alot better headphones.

So I would bash them and say they arent innovative.

I'll give you the point about the wireless transfer, that's a nice idea. But FM radio? That's hardly an excuse to buy a Zune over another MP3 player. And it's not incredibly innovative either... how long has FM been around?

So the FM isn't a new idea, but having that in the original device isnted of having to buy another add-on just for FM is a pretty big difference.

There are plenty of players with FM included in the device already.

If you think MS doesn't innovate, you're clearly only letting yourself see what you want to see.

I mean, for crying out loud, it's a portable media player. What do they need to do to make it 'innovative'? These things are never innovative. They just incorporate other new technologies in one way or another. First it was removable media (walkman, CD players), and now it isn't (flash, HDD). As far as the current memory formats, neither Apple nor MS did any innovation at all. Nor did either of them offer the first product in those formats.

So what does that leave...interface? Buttons? Touch screens? Oh wow, a button was moved here, rotated here, push style or touch sensitive here...this is not innovating!

Ultimately it's a device that plays some compressed format of audio portably through another device that feeds the sound into our ears (ie., headphones), with controls that are ideally just as usable without looking at them (so please leave touch screens out of our music players, kth. There's nothing to innovate there except what kind of hardware is used to perform those jobs, and how the software is programmed to present our media to us.

Gotta say, MS has Apple beat on hardware quality and GUI. Sorry.

Did anyone have that "circular touch-sensitive navigation button" before apple released the ipod? That's interface design, and it must be kind of innovative (in a "it's such a simple idea that I could have came with it myself" way) if it's a)new, b)easy to use and c)being copied all around.

IMO apple proved that there's place for innovation on portable media players when it comes to interface, services and ways to screw your customers.

no it doesn't, even Apple admitted that most people who buy an ipod don't use itunes they use their own music. the success is in the player itself.

No, I only have stayed w/ the iPod because most of my music is from iTunes. Same with my Brother. If i could just port the music into another player..I would.

Dont say "no" just because thats not your particular situation. macrosslover is quite correct in what he said for the majority of cases.

Think about it, why did you buy the music from a service you knew you were going to be locked to one player with?

Another sign of Apple lock-in working it's magic. People should've known about this before they got into iTunes.

That aside, someone should make an app that would let you move your iTunes stuff over to any player. Sure it might not be legal, but still, where is the damn choice?

Here is more of an actual sales representation:

I work for a large retailer and while we sell around 5 iPods a week we have sold exactly 3 Zunes in 2 months. None of this has to do with my biases since I don't really care what they buy as long as they buy something.

Gates and Microsoft have been talking about the Home of Tomorrow for years and years. Still, nothing has changed. Computers and electronics have gotten smaller but that's about it. No one has come up with a good way to integrate electronics into appliances, etc. because what we have now works quite well already.

that's bull****, if you compare the amount of electronics you find in home appliances (or that you carry around with you) with 10, 15 or 20 years ago you would be amazed.

Try the Archos 605, I believe they have a 160Gb version. I use the Archos 604 and love it, best thing I've bought in years. Take a look at their website www.archos.com

Ooo! Thats not bad at all! Pricey.... but still....

Thanks

Fixed

Yeah, I know what you mean, they've really missed the boat on this one. The screen is too small to be used as a decent web browser and there is no efficient way of inputting text. There's alway Zune 3 I guess

Not to mention there weren't as many (decent) media players when the iPod came out, which really allowed Apple to dominate the market.

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Last edited by bangbang023 on 03 Oct 2007 - 23:39

Can you say that again with something resembling English?

What format have they not disclosed? It's a hard drive based player that plays back or transcodes almost any media file to work on the player.

Also they allow you sync via USB or with the upcoming firmware due in November via WiFi as well.

Also what Vendor lock-in are you talking about with MS? You buy the Zune, you use the Zune. What vendors are you talking about.


I think you might be getting this confused with the iPhone that has a vendor lock-in with AT&T-Cingular. That or you're being sarcastic and I'm missing it somehow.

I think he's talking about the communication protocol between the zune and the pc.

Right I know what MTP is. The Zune software uses it's own version of MTP for the ability to autosync and transcode data.


He was talking about formats though. It's pretty simple to figure out that the default transcode formats are standard .wmv and .wma.


That's where I'm confused.

For that price why not buy a PDA or a PDA/Phone? You'd get more functionality out of it.

Also by the way, it's not only the new zunes getting this support. The original Zune30's are getting all of these updates as well.

Microsoft is committed to providing support for even the old generation Zune to keep it current.
How often has anyone seen Apple doing that with the iPods in all honesty.

I'm putting my money on MS. They work with the community on every product they make.

This was actually answered earlier, but basically the 8GB model is flash based and the 80gb model runs off a standard low form factor hard drive.

Flash is infinitely more expensive to work with.

i thought it had something to do with that... using the tiny hard drives that the ipod currently uses for there 60gb models and above

or maybe i thought the bulk of the price could of just been the player...

Ya know... I understand that way of thinking. Put everything, including the kitchen sink in there, and be happy. Well, one thing I've learned, being an avid lover of technology... is this: The more separate the components, the better.

Look at it like this, would you rather have:

1.all-in-one sound system
2.sepetate speakers, amp, cross overs, receiver and sub

1. All in one TV/DVD/VCR
2.TV, DVD player, HD player

When one part of the system fails, you're screwed. So on-board VGA? NO! Separate card. Better performance! We keep jamming crap into everything we use. It's always best to keep things separated.