“It hasn’t all been good news [for Apple’s iPod]. The original iPod, of course, had battery-life issues and it still seems amazing that there’s no way for the user to replace the battery easily themselves in this environmentally conscious age. In fact iPods don’t seem to last long at all – a lot of those we know of have given up after about a year of use, which isn’t really good enough,” The Gadget Show on Five writes. “And iPod Nano customers were upset because it’s perfect looks were easily ruined by its susceptibility to scratches – sometimes within hours of taking it out of the box. All thse problems got us wondering whether, nearly five years after its launch, the iPod is still king of the MP3 market or whether, at last, some serious alternatives have arrived.”
“We looked for rivals to the big iPod; the one with the hard drive large enough to hold your entire music collection, in this case a 60Gb model that costs about £285. After scouring the available offerings two devices stood out as offering serious threats to iPod dominance,” The Gadget Show on Five writes.
The reports looks at the The Toshiba Gigabeat and the Creative Zen Vision M vs. the 5G Apple iPod in terms of ease of use (iPod won), sound quality (iPod and Gigabeat tied), versatility (they strangely mark down iPod because it “has to use iTunes” to load content and give the win to Creative for the built-in FM tuner among other questionable things), and styling (iPod won) and concludes, “iPod is still King.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dave” for the heads up.]
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