I got an email from an electronics store in the US talking about the new Zune. I hadn't paid all that much attention to it but decided to check it out since it was right in front of me. Here's a good page I found: http://www.zunescene.com/ There is a cluster of 4 videos near the bottom. The bottom left video gives a walkthrough of the functions of the machine. The wireless transfer looks pretty cool....
Fair play it does look better than the old bland iPod, the design is a bit lacklustre but it has decent enough features.
Too bad the wireless transfer has all kinds of shitty rules attached, such as being able to listen to a song only three times if you've received it from a friend, and more.
I don't know why people bother with the likes of this and the ipod. Just use a normal MP3 player then copy your own tunes to it. No rules, no limit. Do you really need all these wireless things? Do you really need gigs upon gigs of space? I use a 1 gig Creative ZEN Nano Plus that has fantastic sound, loads of otions, direct MP3 encoding, FM tuner & recorder, mic and other stuff oh and about 9 different languages all in the side of a small lighter. Fill it up with tunes and I'm sorted for the week or longer. Yakumo
It depends what you need it for, I use mine in the car, so have about half of my 30GB filled, if I just listened to it on the bus I wouldn't bother with a 30GB player.
The Zen Nano isn't bad (and is cheap). The other Zen products are ass though. Horribly jerky navigation. The bad part is, a 1GB MP3 player isn't that useful unless you actively put stuff on and off. I use mine for the gym, and am likely to not bother with it out of trips to the gym. After a week or so, I'm sick of the tunes on there. The sad truth is, the iPod is the best out of them, even though the iTunes system of buying music is awful. 95% of stuff I buy isn't available on any e-music style site, so I don't care. And about the gigs and gigs... eventually people are going to start encoding at higher bitrates as a standard (I do all my stuff at 256), which obviously requires more space. Also dont' forget that those 60GB+ iPods handle video.
I have the Zen xtra 30 gig which isn't bad for the price. It's a bit big and bulky by today's standards but at the time is was about half the price of the iPod. And there's no way in hell I'm going to pay $0.99 per track. I was also searching around and found that you can swap the hard drives on the xtra pretty easily to get some serious storage. But in the end it's mostly just a big ass player. I like the WiFi of the Zune. It's cool that you can just transfer songs to a buddy's Zune in a few seconds. You're right about the car....if you've ever had to drive a long distance having 5,000 songs is pretty nice...
I see your point on the bigger space required there GaijinPunch. I guess forsomeone like me though it isn't such a big deal since I don't mind changing tracks every other day. As for cars? You guys need to get with the times and instal a HDD entertainment system 100 gigs of muisc and movies ! It's the way to go. Just a shame I don't have one however my mate does and what a set up ! Rips an entire CD to the hard drive in under a minute at VBR as well. Yakumo
i have a 5gb Iriver h10 and i enjoy it alot. I bought it for the changable battery and the SRS WOW sound. My only complaint is that i have not enough space, wich surprises me since i always wondered why people were so stupid buying 30 gb players. If you like casual music you don't need it, but if you are really into music and have a collection of cd you'd like to take with you and share with other people, then 5 gigs is quickly gone.
Right. This is the thing that (unfortunately) most consumers don't realize, and they just buy the thing that looks coolest. I will hand it to iPod, and all the 3rd party iPod accessory people... they've made it look cute. For me, the smooth navigation is worth the high price tag... and as before, I don't really buy mp3s from sites like Napster & iPod, so I'm basically just buying it for bike rides, trips to the gym, and riding in the car. I can also load it at home, bring it to work, connect it to my PC, adn viola -- I'm listening to whatever I just loaded. Very convenient for someone that's on the move like me. The car thing sounds cool, but I will only have my car another year anyway, so even if I wasn't too big on the iPod, it would be a bit of a waste to trick it out now. I never drive either. I've had my ride 25 months, and am on like 5300 miles.
Me to (IPOD) I use my phone and I have a 1gb micro sd card and when converting down to 56mb i can fit on shed loads.....enough to last me a week or two, not worried about playing in the car as don`t drive that often as use a scooter to get into/out of London and it has quite a reasonable system anway Also as it has windows media I can add tv shows etc etc And it makes telephone calls 2 Megapixel camera 3G 4 x digital zoom Bluetooth technology camera flash digital zoom email external memory MicroSD infrared connection internal memory 128Mb MP3 player Photo Messaging Picture Messaging polyphonic ring tones quad band technology Qwerty keyboard speaker phone True Tones Video Calling Video Messaging wireless LAN But it can`t get TV like Yakumo`s yet OH: even though Orange are trialling this this all singing all dancing isn`t on their list yet :banghead:
Just saw a Zune in my local Circuit City, but I couldn't mess with it much as there was a huge mob of audio / ipod geeks crouded around it chatting away about how it's the next great thing and they all want one. Having looked over the feature set and messed with it for a few seconds I just don't think it's that great. not a bad hd based player, but all of the wifi is worthless.
