“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.
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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.