“If you’ve been wondering how the Zune’s user interface will compare with the iPod’s, we have some real answers for you this morning: the similarities are significant, but Microsoft has made a number of changes that range from cool to not so cool,” Jeremy Horwitz reports for iLounge.
Horwitz reports:
• That Wheel Thing: Not so cool… shaped like a wheel, but it’s really just buttons.
• General UI: Cool-ish. Think iPod, but in reverse: white text on black screens, but with a very iPod-like menu hierarchy.
• Scrolling UI: Cool-ish. [When crolling] screen superimposes the current alphabet letter over the right side of the song list.
• Album Art: Cool. Zune displays album art in a full-screen-width cube at the top of its screen… significantly larger and more detailed than the iPod’s largest such display, thanks to the size of Zune’s screen.
• Integrated FM Radio: Cool-ish. Yes, like virtually every other iPod wannabe out there, it has one.
• Wi-Fi: Eh. Apparently you can use the Wi-fi feature to “loan” other Zune owners music for some short period (a day), giving them the opportunity to buy the tracks themselves from the Zune music store… You may also be able to spool Zune music to a Wi-Fi-enabled Xbox 360, which again is a cool idea, but requires a $100 wireless adapter and the $300-400 console.
• Other Details: Not so cool. Zune is a bit bigger than a standard 30GB iPod, and apparently made entirely of plastic. In addition to the Music menus, there are Videos and Pictures playback interfaces, which aren’t as simple as Apple’s.
“The big question being asked around these parts right now is whether Zune has any feature so compelling that it can really rival the iPod juggernaut. Right now, the feeling is that Microsoft may have gotten a few things closer to right than normal, but neither any individual part of the package nor the complete experience will truly rival the iPod’s super-simple, mainstream experience. At best, we’ve heard predictions that Zune will fight for the same fraction of “tech geek” market share (15%) that Apple hasn’t yet taken; at a $300 entry point with a 30GB hard drive, it’s hard to imagine that Zune gains traction in the iPod’s strongest market, the iPod mini- and nano-loving $250-and-under tiny device buyers,” Horwitz reports.
Many more details and larger photo of the device in the full article here.
Related articles:
Margins, pricing pressures lead iPod vendors to Microsoft Zune? – August 14, 2006
Microsoft to sell single Zune model this fall, rumors of Wi-Fi capability were greatly exaggerated – August 10, 2006
Zune already shedding features? ‘iPod killer’ won’t offer video at launch – August 04, 2006
RealNetworks CEO Glaser a little miffed with Microsoft over Zune – July 28, 2006
Microsoft to spend hundreds of millions, several years on Zune trying to catch Apple iPod+iTunes – July 27, 2006
In wake of Zune announcement, should ex-Microsoft ‘partners’ join iPod ecosystem? – July 27, 2006
Zune: Apple cannot lose. Microsoft cannot win. – July 26, 2006
Analyst: Microsoft partners zune to be the biggest losers – July 25, 2006
In wake of Zune, Microsoft ‘partners’ consider abandoning PlaysForSure – July 25, 2006
Wi-Fi seen limiting battery life on Microsoft’s Zune – July 24, 2006
Why Microsoft’s Zune is doomed to fail – July 24, 2006
Bear Stearns analyst expects Apple to respond to Microsoft’s ‘challenge’ with new iPod innovations – July 24, 2006
Microsoft Zune? They should’ve called it the Microsoft ‘iClod’ – July 24, 2006
Enderle: Microsoft’s ‘iPod killer’ Zune is ‘brilliant strategy’ – July 24, 2006
Microsoft’s so-called ‘iPod killer’ Zune won’t zoom up the charts – July 23, 2006
Microsoft confirms ‘iPod Killer’ plans – July 21, 2006
Microsoft’s rumored ‘iPod killer’ poses little threat to Apple’s domination – July 18, 2006
Microsoft plans Super Bowl ad for ‘iPod killer’ – July 17, 2006
Sounds serious: Microsoft approaches iPod accessory makers for Zune would-be ‘iPod killer’ – July 12, 2006
Microsoft preps complete line of Xbox-branded digital-media products – July 11, 2006
Photo of Microsoft’s ‘iPod killer?’ – July 11, 2006
10 reasons why Microsoft’s ‘iPod killer’ will fail – July 11, 2006
Enderle on what it would take for Microsoft to kill Apple’s iPod – July 10, 2006
Microsoft: ‘iPod killer’ reports based on ‘speculation and rumors’ – July 07, 2006
Can Microsoft hit a fast moving target? Apple likely to debut wireless iPod this year – July 07, 2006
Analysts: Microsoft faces uphill fight to supplant Apple’s iPod+iTunes market dominance – July 07, 2006
Microsoft plans to convert iPod users by replacing iTMS songs with free WMA format songs – July 06, 2006
Microsoft to release wireless ‘iPod killer’ by Christmas to challenge Apple – July 05, 2006
Analyst Wu: Microsoft unlikely to dethrone Apple iPod+iTunes – June 21, 2006
Microsoft preps iPod+iTunes killer – June 19, 2006
Report: Microsoft readying Apple iPod+iTunes rival – June 16, 2006
Microsoft: No iPod killer planned – June 05, 2006
Microsoft, Toshiba, DoCoMo, Victor to develop Japan iPod+iTunes killer – June 02, 2006
MTV-Microsoft URGE music service not targeting iPod, iTunes users; Real CEO PlayedForSure? – December 13, 2005
Patent application shows iPod capable of live wireless video conferencing – June 13, 2006
Apple patent application filed for wireless iPod+iTunes distribution – May 04, 2006
Generator Research: Apple to Ship $4.2bn in Wireless iPods (WiPods) by 2010 – March 14, 2006
Ready for your wireless Apple iPod? – February 09, 2006
Wireless iPod? CSR and PortalPlayer to bring wireless connectivity to personal media players – February 08, 2006
Wireless Apple iPods coming in 2006? – December 09, 2005
More blood on Apple iTunes Music Store’s play button: MyCokeMusic is dead – June 20, 2006
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: iRiver gives up on digital media player market – May 23, 2006
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Sony’s Walkman Bean is cooked – February 13, 2006
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Dell dumps ‘DJ’ hard-drive MP3 player line – February 04, 2006
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: iRiver pulling out of Europe? – February 01, 2006
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Thomson gives up on MP3 player, CE markets – December 12, 2005
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: BenQ withdraws from MP3 player markets – November 28, 2005
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Olympus halts production of portable digital music players – November 09, 2005
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Rio is dead – August 26, 2005
Apple’s iPod has blood on its Click Wheel: Virgin Electronics is dead – March 08, 2005
Apple’s iTunes Music Store has blood on its play button: BuyMusic.com is dead – March 28, 2004
Going…..going……Zune to the bidder from LinuxWorld. Yes, you can go now and try to put Linux on it.
Wow, that is crap.
Meh…big fat hairy deal:
– “iPod Killer” this is not
– it might be as ‘cool’ as any Creative or iRiver offering, but doesn’t even compare to an iPod
White lettering on black screen = hurt eyes.
DOA.
By the time the second iteration arrives…it will be so far behind it will look like a Discman.
By the way…why the hell don’t they put an AM radio in these things? Don’t people get news, information and conversations of interest through AM? Why not?
MDN’s talking “iPod Nano” pop-up ad is actually making me despise not only MDN, now when I hear the words iPod Nano I actually cringe.
I’m getting a Zune.
Keep flushing all of that money down the toilet MS!
MS Zune: “Think iPod, but in reverse.”
MS Windows: “Think Mac, but in reverse.”
Good job MS, way to be innovative.
Sick and tired!
You’re sick, we’re tired! (of you already)
“I’m getting a Zune.”
Not any time “zune” you aren’t, hope you don’t get “sick and tired” of waiting!
AM is dead. Nobody, except maybe Americans, use it. You’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere in Europe, a market amost 3 times as big as the US, that uses it.
To answer your question:
“Don’t people get news, information and conversations of interest through AM? Why not?”
No, nobody in the world outside US uses AM.
Why not? Because AM sucks really hard.
I am actually surprised how good the zune will be. Don’t get me wrong, I’m keeping my iPod and probably buying a new iPod next time. But this is actually better than what I thought they’d be able to create. So I hope they enjoy their 5% market share that they will get, if they are lucky and there aren’t virius’ and glitches (which we haven’t found out yet).
“MDN’s talking “iPod Nano” pop-up ad is actually making me despise not only MDN, now when I hear the words iPod Nano I actually cringe.”
Block it! or are you on a windows machine?
“White lettering on black screen = hurt eyes.”
It also uses more battery power. Constantly
activating all of those LCD pixels uses more
juice. Not to mention the characters being hard
to see unless the backlighting is running all
of the time. I bet the display will be hard to
read in the sun.
Black characters on white= Mac
White characters on white= MS-DOS
The Zune? They should have just called it Poo.
tryd, AM travels huge distances compared to FM. Europe is full of small countries that all speak different languages. Therefore there is no reason to use AM.
The same goes for many other technologies. Many of these countries that are compared to the US are geographically TINY and may not have had any technology preceding it. Look at Japan, tiny country almost totally destroyed in WWII. Of course it has the best technology, nothing is more than 50 years old. Telecommunications service only covers a fraction of the area of the US.
If you want to compare the US to other countries please use Canada, Australia, etc. Large, non-communist countries that don’t rely on prison and sweatshop labor.
Sigh, another plastic gizmo trying to pass as an iPod. Fact: the metal back of the iPod is 90% of its fashion appeal. Because of that, when you hold it in your hand it feels expensive and valuable, like a watch with a metal back is more attractive. But because people who don’t buy music players claim that the iPod is “too expensive”, everybody tries to cut costs, and the metal back is always the first thing to go.
iPod competitors: stop listening to whineyboys on the Internet. No matter what you do, a device with the capacity that people want is going to cost around $200 for the entry-level version. When people are spending this much, they’d rather pay an extra $25 for something built well than accept something cheaply made. Use metal.
@tryd:
In America, AM radio is essential for news, traffic reports, and baseball games. It’s FM that’s going the way of the dodo bird. I could care less about FM, especially on my iPod, but I do wish I could get AM so that I can listen to baseball games if nothing else.
Each individual design decision kind of makes sense…but the blatant avoidance of Apple’s motifs is typical Microsoft. “Black instead of white” (as with the mouse pointer in WIndows) is just like “Recycle bin” rather than “Trash,” “Shortcut” rather than “Alias,” “Explorer” rather than “Finder,” even (stretching the point a bit) “ThinkPad” vs. “PowerBook.”
So they avoided the Apple comparisons by inverting the properties; then they added the stuff that iPod doesn’t have…these all seem like the logical moves for somebody trying to compete with iPod.
But, in the end, it’s someone trying to create the iPod. And you just can’t do that because Apple already did.
tryd “You’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere in Europe, a market amost 3 times as big as the US, that uses it.”
what is the “market” based on, GDP of both are about the same? Population is a bit higher, like 30 something percent… so that cannot be it either.
This is the best thing that can happen to ipod. People will realize that there really is no other substitute (for ipod).
As predicted, Zune’s WiFi integration is underwhelming. OK, so I can loan music to somebody for a day, but streaming it to an Xbox 360 costs $100 for the adapter? Will you be able to sync with a computer wirelessly?
All I see is some questionable functionality at the expense of cost and battery life.
Are they sure the guys who made the UMPC didn’t have a hand in this as well?
The WiFi feature will never work. More that
one person within a 100 mile radius would
have to buy a Zune for it to work.
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After all the headlines for the Zune I must say that this is a bit underwhelming. The press made it sound like it was going to leave the iPod in the dust but there really isn’t anything out of the ordinary about this player. If I was to use a non iPod mp3 player I think the samsung and scandisk to be much better options than the Zune. Truly this is much ado about nothing.
one of these days…Bang Zune … to the moon
Bleh. Typical Microsoft. Big promises to start with, utter mediocrity when finished. If anything, Zune will make people want iPods even more because they see how bad the supposed #1 “iPod killer candidate” is.
You idiot. Thinkpad was made by IBM… IBM MADE the frackin’ G5 processors. The GUTS of Apples were IBMS.
and btw, white on black uses less battery power.
Remind me why I should care about this? Even if it were as good as an iPod, I already own two iPods (20gb, 4gb Nano).
A day late and a dollar short.
Why didn’t they go green text on black? At least then it would look like DOS. So retro man.
Interesting thing… the talking pop-up ads manage to make their presence known running Firefox 1.0 on Mac OSX, but are completely blocked using Firefox 1.5 on Win2K. What gives with that??
‘Zune’ I’ll be getting an iPod next gen… Maybe even pick up a spare older model on eBay. I’m starting to like the notion of collecting some of the original iPods just for historical purposes – and they still work just fine. I like the firewire ports – wish the new ones still had ’em.
MDN magic word “radio” – as in, I don’t want no stinkin’ radio in my iPod.
I love how Micro$oft takes everything Apple does and just reverses it clumsily.
@huh?
Why are you still using Firefox 1.0 on OSX? There’s obviously a reason – I just can’t think of it.
The pics from Gizmodo look like they were taken by a minimart security cam…
@huh?
And why are you using Win2K? There’s obviously a reason – I just can’t think of it.
So with the X-box and this Zune thing I guess MS is slowly moving into the Hardware business.
Pretty soon they will be doing PC boxes just like Apple – well not just like Apple – just like Apple but the opposite.
The next phase of the PC wars?
Until you’ve driven across Saskatchewan at night in January when it’s -40C/-40F and no city or town with a radio station is less than 200 miles/ 320 kilometres away and you want to know whether a blizzard is on its way, don’t knock AM radio from a country that can broadcast only on FM at five watts because it’s only four square kilometres wide and butting up against another country that’s populated with yet another 200 million people speaking yet another language.
Besides, the real good stuff is on 50,000-watt AM radio: George Noorey interviewing aliens from the planet Mong between 25 minutes of ads each hour, for example.
Not to beat a “missing feature” to death but AM radio is often a better signal and does offer, sports, news, weather, traffic, and lots of talk radio of all kinds. FM radio offers a compressed signal for music and is subject to a lot of interference. I probably listen to at least an hour of AM radio every day. It’s really seen a resurgence with the growth of talk radio and the homogenization of radio programming on the FM band. Seriously…if some manufacturer of an MP3 player quietly included AM in the feature set…I’d buy one…and I own three iPods and love them including a first gen that still works great…no battery replacement ever.
Someone help me please
I deleted and emptied the trash with my Originals Pictures in it is there anyway to recover those files??????? I have movies on there that are not saved anywhere please tell me i can get them back
S O S HELP
Until you find out whether there’s any software that can recover the movies, don’t save anything more to the disk! You might obliterate the files with the new stuff.
@jarrettnewsdaily
You have to use Time Machine.
i would use an AM radio attachment on my iPods.
Does anyone know of a technical limitation such that they could not just add it to the existing radio remote that they sell.
1. FM for the gym audio system
2. AM for news/traffic/weather/live sports
3. iPod for music
___
4. Profit!
AM matters because it matters in the U.S.
I don’t care one wit about Europe. If I wake up tommorow and it has disappeared, that’s fine with me. Europeans are cowards, fools, and fags.
to dunx
yeah i understand that…
but seriously does anyone know of away to recover my files? or to revert my computer back to a previous day so that the files are back????
please just help someone else has had to of had this problem before
Zune is a complete me-too product, skimping in some areas (size, asthetics, etc…) in order to try and compete in other arena’s that are necessarially markets.
When MS says this is a four – five year endevor, it is because they are back at the same old game. Throw Zune at the wall with a bunch of advertising (I will not use the word marketing – this product does not deserve such acolades) dollars, and see what sticks. Over the course of serveral years and revisions, they may get something right, but how much share will they really have is the question?
Most importantly, when will Zune become profitable? If ever?
Near the time Zune launches, Apple will have countered with the all new nano – untouchable at it’s price point, and iPhone, which will steer the gadget market a different direction for $300…
Oh, Apple will offer a slighly revised iPod with 40 and 80 GB hard drives at the same price points.
Plastic? People aren’t going to buy that.
http://getkickedoffaplanewearingthis.blogspot.com/
Jarrett,
Don’t save anything to the drive you deleted the files from…it could over right the data. Of course if you use secure delete it probably is gone for good.
Go to http://www.pcinspector.de. They have free software that can recover “SOME” file types.
Or wait for “Time Machne” in Leopard.
I meant “over write” the data
“FM support is fairly complete, with both an FM tuner and an FM transmitter so you can beam the music to your car. The FM transmitter also feeds up Song and Artist information so you can see what’s playing from your car stereo (if it supports that feature, like in GM cars). Pretty neat.”
This is from the gizmodo report. And thats a cool feature. As a whole i wont say that it is compelling enough to ditch my iPod but it is a stronger player then anything creative has come up with.
Plastic? Right – people will inherently feel the difference in quality between the iPod and the Zune – and immediately justify the iPod as the product they want to plunk down $300 – $400 for.
Jarrett…
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/datarecovery.html
This is the only program that I’ve heard of that might possible work. You need to know, that in it’s current version, the mac 0S isn’t designed to allow recovery of files after they’ve been deleted easily. A friend of mine used this site to recover some movie files from a folder that had been trashed using this software. But not all of them.
The earlier advice about stop using your mac is correct. Surfing the net downloads files into cache… possible overwriting your files. Get the software in the above url and then try and get the files back.
good luck (crossing fingers)
FistOfGod said:
“The Zune? They should have just called it Poo”
Wrong (but only just a bit wrong). They should’ve called it the iPoo. But in this case, perhaps Apple legal dpt. would have go after them
Ditch your iPod for an FM transmitter in the Zune? Is it just me, or are FM transmitters lame, lame, lame…
Meanwhile, Apple continues to pile up the car companies with iPod campatibility. Diamler/Chrysler and Ford being the last of the major holdouts.
But really, how many more people that do not yet have an MP3 player are new to the market? Another 60 million or so?
How many more are going to ditch their iPod and iTunes, all their music, and take the time to re-import, buy and convert to Zune so they can have a built-in FM tuner? Please.
Drunk Cheney,
You make a very good point. If MS had a more
closed hardware scheme (as an option to consumers),
then they could build a new OS from the ground up
to complement it. Maybe then (and only then) MS
could ship a better product instead of bloatware.
If they embarked upon that effort right now, surely
it could be ready to ship in 5, 10, or 20 years!
BTW, they use PPC based processors in the XBOX 360.
Can you imagine if the previously imagined PC’s had PPC
chips? That would be ironic and strange.
Oops – very obviously you’ve never been to Europe – as your ignorance shows.
Oh and Jonathan Ives is British. – That means he was born in England – thats in Europe by the way.
CONGRATULATIONS MICROSOFT ON THE BIRTH OF YET ANOTHER MONGREL CHILD…
Why dosen’t it compare to a fscking iPod? It seems to have better features. And features are what’s key. I mean, iRiver’s offer line-in recording, optical out, Fm radio AND cheaper than an iPod. So come on, get fscking real.
For those of you who want radio.
There is an AM/FM Sony Sports Walkman Radio that is virtually indestructible, smaller than an iPod shuffle, gets days of play on disposable AAA batteries, comes with decent ear buds and costs less than $20.00
If you want an MP3 player, iPod is your best bet.
If you want a phone, Nokia is the best choice.
If you want an all in one, does everything well utensil, the Swiss Army Knife is the only one that works. All other all in one attempts fail miserably.
I used to think an FM transmitter was good enough until I got a new ’07 vehicle with a MP3 player plug in port in it’s stereo.
The sound improvement of direct input over FM transmission is just amazing.
FM transmission of iPod music is not where it’s at anymore.
IT’S GOING TO FAIL ” ZUNE” ! AH HAHAHAHA…
Alex,
to respond to your eloquent f*cking comment
(what the hell, have you been watching too much
deadwood?), the simplicity of the iPod is the beauty
of it. The iPod does one thing, and does it damn good.
If you are a gadget nerd, and you desire a lot of tweaks
and buttons to push, then buy the iRiver and shut your
piehole.
That’s a funny one Alex!!!!
What’s really funny about it is that features are NOT key in any sense of the word.
For years manufacturers have been adding features (can you say Microsoft Word?) that satisfy a tiny part of the audience at the expense of making the CORE features really useful and efficient. Finally they end up with a bloated cow that shoots off fireworks. It’s amazing alright…but who wants it?
The thing that Microsoft gets (unlike every other company except Sony who SORT of got it) is that it’s really an eco-system. The player, the store, the functionality.
If you miss on any of those you fail. Every other player has some of it right. There are better players out there from a pure music standpoint…but when you think about it…listening to music on portable player is a compromised audio experience ANYWAY.
BUT…they will have a store (but it won’t be as easy to use or as broadly accepted as iTunes which keeps evolving). They will have a player (that won’t be as easy or elegant to use as the iPod and will be made of plastic)… They will have FM radio so people can access all the compressed signal music, interference, deejays, commercials and promotions they have their hearts set on…did it ever occur to any of these dolts that the rise of the ipod and the decline in FM audience might be somehow…uh… linked!?)
So…again…good one Alex…You might have made some people think you were serious!
The big question being asked around these parts right now is whether Zune has any feature so compelling that it can really rival the iPod juggernaut.
MS could do all sorts of “compelling” things, like:
– Run a trade-in program: one free Zune for one iPod.
– Bundle certificates for free Zune songs with everything MS. Make everything MS a Zune infomercial.
– Bundling free Zunes with new PC’s and everything MS. Then count each bundled sale as a Zune sale, and brag about the “exploding” market share growth.
Never underestimate how low MS can reach…
Competition is never a bad thing… but this “Zune” folly from Micro$oft can hardly be considered competition. It is a poor excuse for an iPod copy. Just like so many other crappy Asian iPod knockoffs. The only problem is that is comes from the biggest technology company in the world…
M$ is rotting from the inside out
Clobber,
You make a good point, but eventually
MS has got to start making a profit on
something besides OS bundle licenses
and Office, or their current expenditures
will pull them down o the ground!
The inability of this website’s readership to comprehend a sarcastic or satirical comment never ceases to amaze (and amuse) me…
–mAc
2 Consoles
1 Media Player Thing
UMPC
Billions of marketing dollars
2 Service Packs
A Myriad of patches, bug fixes and other fun stuff
All of this and more useless, terribly developed crap came spewing from the bowels of Redmond, yet they can’t seem to get Vista’s fat ass out the door. Makes you wonder if it resembles Ballmer….
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GET ON TOP OF YOUR PRODUCTS! MAKE ONE THING WORK RIGHT- THEN MOVE TO SOMETHING ELSE!
(But then again, doing that would have left them stuck with just Windows all these years!);-)
Not to beat a “missing feature” to death but AM radio is often a better signal and does offer, sports, news, weather, traffic, and lots of talk radio of all kinds. FM radio offers a compressed signal for music and is subject to a lot of interference.
Not to criticize your other points, but this part is complete nonsense. AM offers 10khz of spectrum per station, while FM offers 200khz. While you might get poor FM signals far from the stations as AM signals carry farther, the signal in AM is far more compressed and also more subject to interference.
You may have a very poor or broken FM antenna on your radio, as AM and FM antennas are completely different. This is why there isn’t a player available with an AM radio; the antennas must be a fairly large coil, whereas an FM radio can make use of the wire in the headphone cord as an antenna.
mAc-warrior,
There is so much complacency and sarcasm
around lately. Yes, it’s hard to tell the difference
these days. You, however, have the amazement
and amusement to look forward to.
I want a Zune so bad, ’cause we all know the iPod is crap.
– for jarrettnewsdaily
try data rescue II http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
heard it was a very good recovery program, don’t have first hand experience though.
btw let’s just call the Zune what it is – the X-player – as Steve said at his keynote, X-player, like X-box, is a truly great name that symbolizes truly mediocre products – you just gotta love it!!
Wandering Joe:
It’s not because we’re on windows machines that we get pop-up. I use the FireFox web browser, and this is the ONLY website that I have ever visited where not 100% of my popup is blocked. It must be popup in some proprietary mac format that the rest of the free world can’t block. Blame Microsoft.
Wannabe,
The specific bandwidth between AM and FM is not what I was comparing so perhaps I made my point badly. What I was driving at was that FM…which is primarily music isn’t as good as high res mp3 track and certainly not as good as an AIFF file…which while admittedly quite large IS CD audio.
The CONTENT on AM is not something you can download and buy (with the exception of some well known talk shows) because it consists of immediate news, weather, traffic, or other information that doesn’t really work in the podcast format. Except for the occaisonally exceptional radio station for for a change of pace…going to FM on a portable player in 2006 is a feature without a large audience…hence the lack of built in FM in the iPod.
I think you could get around the coil question easily enough for AM….and the interference would be tolerable enough (I’m guessing) since you are not listening to AM for high fidelity. Unless it was just a constant scratchy mess it would be fine. How does the Sony Sport AM/FM radio mentioned in one of the earlier posts in this thread solve the “large coil” problem in a small package?
Jarrettnewsdaily, this is the wrong place to spam with your problems. I feel sorry that you lost some pics, and possibly some illegally copied movies, but you need to take your queries to the appropriate forum.
Podboy, speaking of “ignorance”. Being “British”, does NOT necessarily mean someone has to be born in “England”. Perhaps, you have heard of Scotland? Or Wales?
And, as for England being “in Europe”, many there, would contest that!
Clearly, you’ve never been to Europe.
“You make a good point, but eventually
MS has got to start making a profit on
something besides OS bundle licenses
and Office, or their current expenditures
will pull them down o the ground!”
Expenditures? But MS is on top of the world, they have all this market share and are making billions! They can’t lose!
</sarcasm>
Now outside of Redmond, the world knows MS is starving for a hit, ANY hit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zune becomes a massive loss-leader as MS strong-arms to MAKE it a market-share success.
As for making money outside of Windows & Office: as long as the cash cows keep giving, don’t expect any real changes at MS.
WInston said:
“@tryd:
In America, AM radio is essential for news, traffic reports, and baseball games. It’s FM that’s going the way of the dodo bird. I could care less about FM, especially on my iPod, but I do wish I could get AM so that I can listen to baseball games if nothing else.”
Well – that’s fine, but I was talking markets here. Whichever way you look at it the US is a tiny market, and the question remains – should Apple include something that is useless to most of its market?
Just a few numbers (population):
“AM countries” (US, Canada, Australia) – 350 mill
“FM countries” (Europe + Japan) – 900 mill
“Other” countries:
China – 1 300 mill
India – 1 100 mill
Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines – 360 mill (bigger than US, Canada and Australia combined).
In Europe, AM went “the way of the dodo” 30 years ago. FM will probably do so within the next 10 (to be replaced by digital radio).
Helloooo
Australia would qualify as an FM country … (well actually AC/DC …. AM/FM … get my drift?)
Sounds like all the other iPod wanna be’s. They think by adding an FM radio somehow that’s going to make it an iPod killler. Well the truth is, it’s not! Same old thing from the competition and the wireless option is to expensive!
Here’s a tiny, 10 dollar AM radio…why would this be so hard to
create as an add on to the ipod? Anyone with a good technical explanation?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00024L210/sr=8-8/qid=1155915029/ref=sr_1_8/103-8176542-2803824?ie=UTF8
Why doesn’t this one need a big antenna?
Does anyone know how videos would play on that huge “portrait” screen? Looking at the list interface indicates it will be a portrait set-up. Unless they’ve built-in a switcher to landscape mode for viewing video, that sceeen will be a waste of real estate. It’s not exactly the right proportions for video. I also wouldn’t want to have to read that white lettering on a black screen out in the bright sun. I have a Moto Razor set to a dark background, light lettering, can’t read a damn thing.
The only time you’d apply the term “coolish” to Microsoft products is when they start making heaters.
Zune is a stupid name. Period.
Hmmm… it doesn’t sound like something I’ll ever trade my iPod for. I don’t own an XBox, either, so whatever.
I still think it’s totally reasonable for Zune to have 20% market share in three years, though – like M$ said they were aiming for.
” I still think it’s totally reasonable for Zune to have 20% market share in three years, though – like M$ said they were aiming for. “
More reasonable to have them throw in the towel and discontinue their piece of plastic loser crapplayer within 12 months.
Sony Bean? DJ Ditty? etc. . . Hello…?