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Sony's "iPod killer" Fails to Draw Blood
Mr_Silver writes "Walter Mossberg (of WSJ fame) managed to review the new Sony NW-HD1 and was distinctly unimpressed. The upsides: it's smaller, lighter and has a battery life of 20 hours. The downsides: goodbye MP3 - hello ATRAC3, slow upload (and converting) times and the confusing user interface on the walkman, PC software and the music store. When will someone pass Sony the cluestick?"
Cluestick...
non-MP3...
dead battery...
Sony R&D, try again. You missed the general populance.
My heart really does go out to the hardware engineers at Sony. After all, they created a really nifty device that bests the iPod in two important areas (battery life, size). All they needed was workable software and no intentional crippling, and the NW1 would have been at least a strong #2. Instead, Sony intentionally crippled it by not enabling MP3 playback, over-promised what it really did (based on lousy, lossy 48kbps ATRAC3+), and provided mediocre software at best.
One of these days, the hardware guys at Sony will get the upper hand again, and Apple really will have something to worry about.
I suspect the cluestick will come in the form of crappy sales.
The cake is a pie
I haven't seen anything from them lately that hasn't been a (weak) attempt to lock you into their proprietary (now-)second-rate import electronics. Seriously, it's bad enough that nothing they make is at all above low-to-average quality, but now they want to lock you into it? No way.
funny munging
its quite amusing that Sony tries to promote its terrible formats but always fail, minidisc, ARTRAC, Betamax, MemoryStick the list of failures goes on and on
perhaps if they embraced worldwide standards instead of its own attempts people might accept them
do you think the PS2 would be quite as popular if they had used their own format of discs instead of DVD and CD's ?
perhaps they should take a leaf out of their own experiences
The big battery-killer is the drive. Find a way to use it less, and you'll get longer battery life. Two ways: more SDRAM buffer memory, and lower data rate (like the sibling post so eloquently poinnts out). Of course, if you skip around a lot so that your music selections are not predictable, you'll force the drive to spin up and kill it much sooner -- that's why a 2-hour SDRAM buffer won't help that much in real live (but it will make the specs look good)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Why is this story in the Apple category? Sure, the iPod may be considered to be the "gold standard" for music players by many people, but Apple certainly weren't first, and although they have a sexy design and a great UI, there are plenty of competitors who are shipping thousands of units who do everything nearly as well, and some things better, often for a significantly lower price.
I'm not trying to bash Apple, I like their products (although my pockets aren't normally deep enough to afford their latest kit, I have a G4 cube next to my PC), but putting this into the Apple category just seems a bit odd.
That now, rather than describing the iPod as the "walkman of the 21st century", we're describing new Sony products as "iPod killers"...
And as far as when Sony will find the cluestick, maybe it'll happen after the PSP totally fails as a media device in the U.S...
How can Sony claim that ATRAC offers better performance than MP3 when the chances are it'll be converting songs *from* MP3? Lossy format to another lossy format? No thanks. When will Sony (and other companies) realise that people don't want weird, crippled formats?
You must think in Russian.
Big surprise - ATRAC3 has DRM!
All I can think of when I see this kind of thing is that the media companies are building a case for a future lobbying effort to outlaw non-DRM-locked hardware.
Sony just developed an eBook reader - the first to use an e-ink display, and then castrated it with DRM, and a total library of 400 expire-in-2-months books.
Obviously products like these are going to fail, and I just can't see their existance as mistakes. Sony may be smarter than they appear.
One major downside of the new Walkman is that it can't play MP3 files, or any of the other standard formats. It can play back only a proprietary Sony format called ATRAC3, or a variation called ATRAC3plus.
STEEEERIKE ONE!
This means that, when you transfer your MP3 files to the new Walkman, Sony's PC software must laboriously convert them first into ATRAC3 files.
STEEEERIKE TWO!!!!
To transfer MP3 song files from your PC to the Walkman, you first launch the software Sony supplies to manage the Walkman, called SonicStage 2.... ... the Sony software must grind away, converting all of them, one at a time, to the special Sony format.
For my test, I used a very modest collection of 431 standard MP3 files.... ...it took an agonizingly long two hours and 13 minutes to transfer the remaining 416 tracks to the Walkman.
STEEEEEERIKE THREE!!!! YOU'RE OUTA HERE!
WTF was Sony thinking? Let's see, right now, I have 8991 mp3s that eat 53.64 gigs of space on my drive. If it took him 133 minutes for 416 tracks, it would take me...ummm (open crackulator) 468 hours to convert my files to a Sony compatible format!!!!
that's only about Nineteen DAYS
I think I speak for many when I say:
Sony: kindly go FUCK YOURSELF - YOU MORONS.
think about it - RIGHT.... I'm going to let my machine Grind Away for what - the better part of a month, just so my mp3 collection will fit on their stupid little player?
Ummmm, No.
I'll take my iPod THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
Note to Sony: GAME OVER. Would you like to play again?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'm far from an Apple fan, but I do admire the execution of their whole iPod/iTMS business. In principle, building a good music player and on-line music business doesn't sound very complex. You'd think a dozen of companies could do it. Yet, after all this time, still nobody can touch the whole Apple package. Hats off to them, and I don't even use an iPod/iTMS.
I imagine that Sony has an uphill fight on its hand due to the differences between their corporate culture and Apple's. Apple engineers are, I bet, given more free reign to do things right, where Sony's engineers are probably in a Dilbert-like world of impossible demands by toga-clad marketing departments. And, of course, Apple's specialty has always been the end user software experience, an area where Sony has a lot of catching up to do. And don't forget about patents... it's easy to say, Why doesn't x-company's device do what y-company's device can do, when we don't have to worry about y-company filing an infringement suit, and don't have executives breathing down our necks to get this product on store shelves by July.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
With all this hype about HD-based MP3 players, people may has forgotten to look at other options.
Not everything Sony produces is outright bad. I recently purchased a Sony D-NE300 CD based MP3 player for $99 CAD. I can easily store more music on a single CD (128Kbps) than i can listen to in an entire day. Not to mention, that with some high capacity NiMH batteries (I use 1600 mAh) I get about 50 hours of playtime out of it. I remember my last (fairly old) Sanyo walkman only went for about 6 hours before it sputtered out.
Given this, why bother with an iPod or similar device at all? Blank CDs are cheap, and if I burn 3 or 4 I have more than enough selection to keep me going for several days.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Er, right. So this is a magic format that restores the information in the lost bits from the original mp3 conversion?
And, Sony marketing says, it'll give you a pony.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
What does "obsolete" mean? Are there not 1st-gen iPods still happily cranking out 10gb of music? I mean, I'm the proud owner of the new 40gb clickwheel iPod, but I'd hardly call the 1st gen products "obsolete". Superseded by biggerfastercheaper units? Sure! But that happens in the electronics industry.
If the tool still does the thing you bought it to do, it's not obsolete.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Sony wouldn't be able to read the cluestick even if was passed to them, it's incompatible with the Memorystick technology that they're so in love with...
Sony is rarely about putting out good technology, they're more about putting out technology that consumers will buy despite a higher-than-usual profit margin on the price. Sure, every consumer electronics company has to make a profit or it won't exist, but Sony products are always higher-priced than technically equal models from other brands. Basically, Sony's profits come only from people too stupid to notice there's a better choice on most items.
I can't believe a megapowerful corperation like Sony could screw up as bad as this Network Walkman. The critical mistake, in my mind, is the proprietary Sony format ATRAC3 they're trying to pimp off on the consumer. Why are they trying to re-invent the wheel?
Which brings to mind the iPod and it's perfect design. It's clean form-factor looks like it was designed by God. The most brilliant things in life are simple in design and concept. Like the wheel.
If Sony can't beat the iPod, maybe nobody can.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
This Sony seems like a reasonable alternative so long as you don't mind the interface and ... their proprietary (file) format
.MP3 format. Our music lives on as data long after the physical media had died / scratched / been lost or stolen.
That's like saying prison isn't so bad as long as you don't mind getting fscked up the ass.
Guess what Sony - we mind. We have a zillion songs already on our hard drives in
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
This is like MS deciding they want a piece of the Linux cake and coming out with their own distro but making it so that you can only install programs in a special MS-approved format.
I do love capitalism. It has allowed me to run my own business and do things my own way for a very long time. Things I'd be hard pressed to do under most other economic systems. What you're talking about is "unenlightened capitalism" and that's very different.
... Sony's problem isn't lack of vision, or necessarily any more corporate greed (see: Nintendo) but the fact that their vision of the future of entertainment has been corrupted by their investment in the movie/music industries, and is far too closely allied with that of the RIAA/MPAA crowd. A true pact with the Devil. Remember, it was Sony that fended off the MPAA in the original Betamax case and permitted the VCR to exist. I had to respect Sony for that at the time. But now, they're just the manufacturing arm of the MPAA, so far as I'm concerned.
But still
One might add that it's a bit unnerving to have a foreign power (any foreign power, allied or not) wielding as much power over the media in this country. Sony Entertainment controls an awful lot of what we see.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
When will Sony (and other companies) realise that people don't want weird, crippled formats?
128kbps MP3s are weird and crippled, but kids love 'em. Cassette tapes are weird and crippled, too, and they were popular for many years. Lots of people seem to think VHS was weird and crippled compared to Betamax (PS: VHS won).
The average consumer will tolerate weird and crippled formats if they're not too weird, and not too crippled. You can degrade the signal quality to a remarkable degree before the average listener (or viewer) will care.
Who cares what the WSJ thinks? They're not the target market for this device. The kids at whom the it is aimed may make purchasing decisions based on a lot of factors, some more rational than others (e.g. what their friends bought, etc.), but "it sounds like ass" is not necessarily on their radar screen. Ass sounds fine to them. As long as they can tell which song is playing, that's good enough.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
They're obsessed with ATRAC because the RIAA is obsessed with DRM. No other reason. Sony has become more schizophrenic than most hardware manufacturers. I mean ... companies like Apex and others that make consumer electronics are often at odds with media companies and their puppet attorneys (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) because the hardware guys make money by providing more bang-for-the-buck to the customer, and the media companies make money by providing less. Sony is trying to be both a media company and a consumer electronics manufacturer, and they don't seem to be able to decide which they really are. And that's a problem, because the media conglomerates want to force hardware makers to reduce the value of their products to consumers by severely restricting what can be done with those products. Sony is going to have to decide, at some point, which is more important to them, selling content or selling hardware. And until that happens, I won't knowingly buy anything that comes from Sony, because I don't want my money going to support the DMCA II or whatever stupid legislation next comes out of Congress.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Your total misunderstanding of both the market and your parent poster are not a surprising correlation.
Weird: unusual, handled poorly or not-at-all by common products
Crippled: unable to do things that are technically easy (or at least possible) in an attempt to force more money into a company's pockets.
So no, mp3 is neither "weird" (EVERYTHING handles it!) or "crippled" (no DRM, no obvious missing features). VHS? Yeah, I know a couple devices that can handle that. Oh hey, look at that, I can easily copy it, too! I won't drag on this post by writing another two sentences about casette tapes.
Weird and crippled formats suck, almost always fail, and do not include any of the examples you provided.
"Gotta love capitalism." I couldn't agree more. Capitalism is a great theory. I just wish we had some.
In truth, capitalism exists only when and where the people have capital. In our current corrupt economic systems, only the privileged have reasonable access to capital.
Sadly, three to seven percent of the world's population, control the vast majority of the world's capital. The remaining ninety some percent of the people are basically serfs or slaves.
So, quite frankly, what did you expect from a bunch of elitists. The iPod and the Sony device are exactly what you'd expect from highly positioned and typically irresponsible, overpaid, megalomaniacal managers.
As long as we allow the wealthy to corrupt and pervert the economic and political system, we will simply have to pay the price. My advice, get used to manipulative and meaningless devices.
Some of you will read this and dismiss it as evidently untrue, at least for you. I say this most likely is because you are part of the elite. Try to be honest at least and accept that you are advantaged. I say to you, your self-service costs you more than it cost us, which represents a terrible loss to us all.
To the rest of you, simply don't buy crap. Save your pennies. Strive for nonmaterialistic financial independence. Seriously avoid credit like the plague it is.
Metaphorically speaking, it's always amazed me how so many would rather be landlords in hell rather than tenants in heaven.
Words to men, as air to birds.
It just acted like a native drive when connected to a computer. The medium itself is amazingly efficient and the new 1GB discs are a far better portable solution than anything else including CD. Even the size is about as small as an iPod and it doesn't scratch or easily deteriorate in harsh conditions. We all know the ways they screwed it up via DRM and cumbersome interfaces, but as to it's physical operation, if it was just like a ZIP disc, it would have been a huge success and given CD a big run for its money.
You sound like you know what you're talking about, so I'll assume that you're right about those product tradeoffs. I still don't see how that means either of those products should "beat" Apple.
People do care about volume, but not sound quality. They're listening to their iPods via earbuds on the subway. Sound quality just won't matter.
And bigger isn't fine for most people. When Apple wanted to expand their line, they built the mini. They knew what they were doing.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
So many people seem to assume that if you have a built in radio and other features, or better battery life, that it "kills" the iPod. But it isn't enough for everyone.
Not everyone buys iPods and loves them because of just the style. I personally love the iPod because of the brilliant hardware interface for controlling and navigating through a ton of music, and I also love the integration with iTunes, which I prefer much more over the various software packages (or none at all) that I would use with other players.
I only bring this up because you seem to be saying that the iPod is only "winning" because it is stylish and sexy, and that you can't seem to grasp why some people still like the iPod and aren't all rushing out to buy the Creative Zens or iRiver iHP's or whatever other devices.
-Tom
I believe all this talk of "iPod killers" having failed and that Apple cannot be toppled in the market is vastly premature.
Don't forget Microsoft is planning both a music store and a hardware reference platform...
This, combined with Microsoft's marketing muscle (and just imagine what they have at their disposal: an ad in every Hotmail message sent around the world, an icon on the desktop from XP SP2, every CNet headline for 6 months, etc, etc) could blow a hole in Apple's music initiative as large as a dinosaur killing crater.
In case you think I've strapped on the Gates & Ballmer Live Rock Cafe headphones, I've had both a 1st gen iPod and a 3rd gen iPod, and am responsible for encouraging about 12 people to get their own (I take no credit, it was as easy as saying "look at this").
However, I'm also old enough to have seen what Microsoft did to the Macintosh once they set their nuclear powered submarine sights on it. I predict history will repeat: an inferior store and an inferior player will blast iPod into niche status.
The market will not be better for it.