Microsoft's answer to the Ipod!
jazzman21
287 Posts
....The Zune. This thing is not only a mp3 player, but it plays Jpegs, videos, has a FM radio, etc. It's coming out later this year for the holidays. I can't Wait!!! 
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all in all, don't think its actually gonna work. microsoft has a history of making alot of promises and keeping 10% of them. but maybe viacom will slap them around a bit.
plus the branding is
No shit. What wa stheir first name choice? Eye-Pod???
Microsoft has never been known for being innovative and their design team just sucks ass. They're always playing catchup. I wonder if Google is creating an operating system?
but then again so is iPod
Yet iPod has become part of our common lexicon, so much so that a term like "podcasting" has become universal without even needing to directly refer back to the iPod itself.
Microsoft's design is embarassing - if you want to create an "iPod killer", they should have found some way to make it look vaguely different instead of an obvious clone. The wifi capabilities are interesting but practically speaking, I'm not convinced this is a necessary feature esp. since transferring songs to a mobile device is still going to infinitely faster with a USB 2.0 connection than wifi.
The wifi looks pretty good.
Plus, imagine...
You're on a plane. See a qtee using one. All of a sudden she gets a request to grab a song. She downloads it and smiles as she's listening. Looks around to see you smiling at her. You end up hooking up!
Join the mile high club...
THANK YOU BILL GATES!!!
you left out the part where you get tazered by an air marshal and get a body cavity search for using wifi on a plane!!!
REAL TALK.
I can see wifi being used on an airliner.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/06/technology/personaltech/united_wifi/
oh yeah. i'm so used to hearing ipod that i forgot how cheesy the name is.
but zune....gross. i can't stand the way that sounds. kinda like how i hate that car commercial that has the song that goes ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM! ugh, go away bad sounds
haaahaha that shit is like nails on the chalkboard
well the thing is ipods aren't that great! they're incredibly poorly constructed and break/fail all the time. if someone came out with something comparable that was more reliable i think they could have serious potential. hopefully even the threat of competition will force Apple to step up the quality of their ipods.
Wot about:
All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom-zoom-zoom
and a poom-poom - JUST SHAKE YA RUMP
Does that get a pass?
all i wanna do is clean my room room room with a broom broom
the rumors at the studio i worked at was that microsoft would gradually turn the zune into the portable xbox 360 but they wanted to start small (as a music only device) and watch its user base grow to the point in which putting the gaming technology in it seemed less risky.
I do not think this device will last. apple will come with some next shit soon since generation 5 ipods didnt sell as well as planned. hopefully the zune lasts long enough that the competition makes for some outstanding products.
fuck that...the past 4 ipods i have had have all fucked up because of some technical problem. i used to ride for macs, but them shits are made in a factory just like everything else. steve jobs does not get a pass just cuz
and shit is like betamax (kinda)...if it works better/or just as well, and gains popularity folks will leave ipod in droves. dog...if apple knows one thing to be sure, its that they make good designs, others jack em and the others end up being more popular.
and as for the design, not sure why you guys are expecting some radical design shift. this shit doesn't gotta be like "get smart". the media player doesn't have to look like a shoe. you dont cry when samsung comes out with a cell phone that looks like other cell phones...
But with moves into solid-state data storage (memory chips to you and me), breakages and failures are less likely.
where's the BLING!?... that shit's like a watered down lemonade version of an iPod! Fu(k Micro$oft's design aesthetic!
It goes "Zoom, zoom, zoom/ capoeira meta une" (sp?)
which means "zoom zoom zoom, capoeira kills one"
Somehow, I don't see Microsoft surpassing Apple in the reliability category.
The wireless capability of the Zune the only killer app that it holds over the iPod. Because as neat-o as the color brown is, it cannot be truly be classified as "killer."
And I have to say: Microsoft's greatest accomplishment may well be its skill in clouding the minds of consumers so as to obfuscate the fact that they are, indeed, Microsoft.
apparently, if you transfer stuff to another zune it gets deleted after 3 days or 3 plays:
http://www.zuneinsider.com/2006/09/answers_to_some.html
Well, if it didn't have some kind of DRM like that the device would essentially be allowing copyright infringement. Yeah, as a user of content it sucks but that's life and the law. If MS didn't have some kind of DRM like that they'd be opening themselves to all kinds of lawsuits and more than likely the device wouldn't even make it into stores to begin with.
Friday, September 15, 2006
Microsoft Zune will violate Creative Commons licenses
The new Microsoft Zune player (their soi-disant "iPod Killer") applies DRM to all the files you move onto it, even the Creative Commons-licened music. The problem is that CC licenses prohibit this. What's more, CC licenses are machine-readable and could, theoretically, be detected by Microsoft, if they cared enough about copyright to ensure that they were adhering to the license policies set out by creators.
There currently isn't a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can???t tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding.
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