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Creative, Apple Battle for MP3 Player Market
kurtz_tan writes "Creative Technology is spending 100 million in a marketing blitz to 'regain its rightful place in the audio industry' by trying to dominate the MP3 market which is now led by the Apple iPod (54% of the market last year for MP3 players that use hard disks). Creative is second with 16.5%. Does Creative Zen sound as cool as Apple iPod ?" And reader TheMediaWrangler writes "The Register reports that Apple will build a stockpile of flash-based iPods to be shipped as early as January or February of 2005. AppleInsider had the original scoop."
54% of the hard drive market? The AppleInsider article states 92%. Where do these statistics come from? Useless, unverifiable... Quote a source, dammit!
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
If you can judge by the presence of iPods in New York City (and you can't), you'd think there are no other MP3 players on the market. Everyone has an iPod here, to the point where it looks lame, too much of a fashion statement for my taste.
Simpy
I've owned two iPods, and I've never taken a look at one of Creative's offerings. As has been said (probably) countless times every time an iPod story shows up here, Apple has the Holy Trinity of online music: Software (iTunes), Store (iTMS), Player (iPod). You're just not going to beat Apple until you come to the field with at least those three pieces.
Wow, why don't they spend $100 million on making a superior product in stead of marketing an inferior one?
Yes, but is Creative's offering an iPod Killer?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Instead, how about cutting the price a little more? Digital music players are a huge market, and not everyone can afford an Ipod. You don't need to market it as cool and hip, just market it as functional and not so damned expensive. I have a Zen, and it's a wonderful player, but you're not gonna win anyone over appealing to style; Apple has that covered.
Oh you can't count the iPods in NYC? I was visiting the city this summer and was standing outside the Trump building on Madison with a friend, playing what we called "the iPod game". We were trying to either spot people with white iPod headphones, or people geeky/trendy enough to know where the Apple Store was. We had no success finding the Apple Store (however did find another retailor, who was stocked out of the Mini I wanted to buy). It was none the less an amusing game to play; I'd estimate of 1000 people walking by: 25 people were stopped, 2 had iPods, 10 were out of towners, 5 were attractive, 2 of those were willing to chat it up, and 0 knew of, or where the Apple store was
I bought the Zen Nomad because it was certainly a lot cheaper than the comparable iPod at the time, and I liked it. Yes it was larger, but the battery was good. Now it's dead, and since I've gone iTunes I decided to switch. There's stuff I miss (like making playlists on the player itself) but I have to admit the iPod is really nice. The AAC files take about half the space as MP3s and sound better. I didn't do a scientific study but on several songs with quiet passages the MP3 version sucks compared to AAC, and the MP3 was encoded at the max bit rate.
And it's about half the size!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Why not spend that $100,000,000 on reducing the cost of their MP3 players and let them sell themselves?
This is something i've always found strange.
MABASPLOOM!
Hmm. I think Creative is receiving its just desserts since the release of the first Nomad Jukebox.
They had a special team in their R&D center in Scotts Valley design that product, and then after it was done, they laid off most of the people in that project team and outsourced them to a less-experienced team in Singapore.
Consequently, some of the team was picked up by Apple which went on to develop the second rev iPod.
Detachment 3 Media
Exposed, Exploited, Exploded
Whenever there's an iPod vs X brand player, the same arguments pop up. Well, I'm an iPod fan, trough and through. And now I understand why.
The iPod does its few tasks with a 'very good' rating for all of them. FireWire transfer = Very good. Biggish screen, backlit but (for the most part) no colours = Very good, sound quality = Very good, battery capacity = Very good (12 h), expandability = Very good (lots of accessories, much more than the others), design = Very good, UI = Very good.
The reason for for its success is the average 'Very Good' rating that users and critiques give it.
What about the others? Well, usually they have one outstanding feature but that is not enough to raise the overall user experience to the iPod level.
We geeks often put on blinders when it comes to gadgets and forget what people want. And while we may choose another product because we evaluate OGG-support to be an 'Excellent' feature, most people do not. They see like this: FireWire transfer = Very good. Small screen, backlit but (for the most part) no colours = bad, sound quality = Very good, battery capacity = Very good (12 h), expandability = bad, design = bad, UI = fair, OGG support = WTF?
And the round goes to iPod. In my work, I have tried out a huge number of iPod 'killers', and frankly they don't reach to the knees of iPod for an average person. I saw this hot chick on the tram today, she had a 2001 Creative Nomad. It was twice or three times the size of my old portable Sony CD player. Apple chose the right direction early and are now reapling the benefits.
Hmm. "cool"? So that's how they spell "asstastic" at Creative Labs these days!
Let's see. The iPod wins hands-down in functionality, usability, and appearance. So who cares if the Zen sounds cooler? We're only talking about audio output devic---hmm, that didn't come out quite right.
*backpedaling furiously* Umm, I mean, they're both solid-state, so they all sound cool! And it's winter! So gimme a nice warm set of vaccuum tubes powered by a backpack-mounted car battery or give me death, man!
"Currently, Creative has 600 research and development staff working on its MP3 players, and plans to hire another 300 engineers."
This is why the Creative products will never be as good. 600 people in R&D for their player? What are all those people doing, reading fark?
You'd think they'd hire 5 people with imagination to replace the 450 people who aren't doing anything except meeting with each other.
Creative is going on an all-out blitz/preemptive strike against Apple, which will immediately become a contender in January for the flash-based player market.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
iPods have been able to play MP3's for longer than they have been able to play M4A's and M4P's... IIRC, the original 5 GB iPod didn't even have support for AAC (much less the DRM.) iTunes originated as a Mac MP3 player called SoundJam.
However, Steve personally didn't like the audio quality of MP3s and defaulted iTunes to burn them at 160 kbps instead of the traditional 128 kbps. This combined with the inital iPod's support only for the Mac platform limited its appeal until Apple integrated MPEG-4 and it's AAC codec into QuickTime. Once this occured, Apple finally had a "ideological" business reason to leverage the iPod onto the Windows platform: as a way to reinforce QT installations on PCs. QuickTime technology drives many of Apple's high scale packages, like Final Cut Pro, as well as making a good PR platform to keep Macs on the radar, so more visibility of QT verses Real or Window Media was in line with Apple's historical biases.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Unlike the iPod, however, Creative's players can play back Windows Media Audio (WMA) files sold by many of the iTunes Music Store's competitors.
So what? Unlike the iPod, however, Creative's players CAN'T play back AAC files sold by the most popular online music store in existence!
Illegal, immoral, or whatever, Real was on the right track. It's like trying to break Microsoft's OS monopoly: "Yea, well our OS runs the GIMP!" Unfortunately, *most* people don't care.
The first hard-drive based MP3 player I bought was a Creative. The second was an Apple. Why did I switch? Simple, the software that shipped with the Creative was lousy. I ended up buying the Notmad software from an independent third party and that was much better, but I really don't feel like I should have to. My MP3 player should just appear as an external hard drive in Windows, should work as easily in Linux, and the MP3 software should be of high quality as well.
I can't say I'm particularly impressed with iTunes, mind you, but at least an iPod appears as an external drive when I plug it in. I don't need to cart around extra software to install.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Apple at least realises the value of solid engineering and a good user experience.
The iPod, while not jam-packed with features, is fast and stable.
Creatives products (at least the older ones i have seen) are slow and buggy.
The iPod is sleek and minimalist, Creatives products are covered with chrome trim and raised, plastic buttons with a little hole you have to push a paperclip into to reset it.
The iPod's elegance and simplicity extends to its custom written and polished software package. Creative just bundles whatever crap it can license the cheapest.
I gladly bought an iPod, I wouldnt touch a Creative player with a ten foot pole.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
...it's really no contest. I had a Creative 20 Gb Nomad Jukebox that I bought at the end of 2002. Had it for a year, and it was...serviceable. It was bulky (I know not a problem with the Zen as much), the interface was awful, and the software was beyond horrific. I got my iPod in December 2003. It's been flawless. My biggest gripe with it is shorter battery life, but that's only because I actually use it for 8 hours a day, unlike the Nomad, which was clunky in every way it was possible to be clunky. Sure, the iPod is luxury-priced, but it's worth it to me. I suppose Creative has improved their products (likely) and software (doubtful) since I last used them, but I wouldn't go back to try.
Well, there's a difference between audio and video on the PC and the consumer's perception:
Even the cheapest of CRT's these days is good enough to compare the output from a poor video source vs a near-perfect video source.
Audio, on the other hand, is often neglected. Most consumers don't have a great set of speakers connected to their PC, and even if they do are still listening to MP3's (which aren't the purest of audio sources). Low S/N, poor reproduction, etc is fine in a PC because most consumers don't demand better -- indeed, they cant even spot a difference in the sound quality.
FWIW, I agree with you, but we care and can discern good SQ vs bad, whereas just about everybody else doesn't care. It's easier to spot jaggies in a 3D game than it is to spot a "jaggy" in a sound file.
Is there truly a strong market for flash-based players? I know they're low-cost, and I know Apple would not launch a new line without strong market research, but flash is expensive per Meg... can it really be significantly cheaper than the Mini, especially with a 1GB maximum?
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
I personally liked Ephpod better. I just needed a simple interface, and I wasn't going to be buying any music from the Itunes store. For those of you who don't know, Ephpod is a free software package that is used to upload/organize/configure music on your ipod. Give it a shot, I really liked it.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
AAC is essentially MP4, so Creative would be behind Apple by about 3 years in this regard.
From http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/aac/ - Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is at the core of the MPEG-4, 3GPP, and 3GPP2 specifications
It most likely won't be Creative, at least not this year or next, but the Koreans are coming with a slew of low priced harddrive based music players. Some of the 20gb are going to be less than $200!
I have a 3rd gen iPod and while its nice some of the accessories are just junk or wear badly, like the apple remote control.
People too easily dismiss the competitors to the iPod while ignoring the big picture. There isn't just one iPod killer, there are dozens. One of them may just get the idea right. Look bad to the 80s when Apple was flying high with their PC. Yet there were dozens of "others" coming along using someone elses product.
Also, don't forget there are many people who don't like Apple either and that is something many still like to ignore.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The iPod mini is $249, and the Micro is $249.
You mean the Creative Touch or Zen vs the iPod?
Inferior really is relative. The difference between the products, to me, is great enough that buying a Creative Zen Touch is like wasting $200 while buying an Apple iPod isn't.
GPL Deconstructed
Probably not, but their not so "gentle" reminder to "register your product" that won't close until you remove inetreg.exe from the registry and restart your computer did a good job of scaring me away. Good products? Maybe, but with this kind of marketing screaming "register now!", they should lose all their customers.
What?
You know up till quite recently Apple was all about saying over and over "Flash Sucks". Jobs made a point of dissing the Flash players during the interviews around the iPod Mini launch, even toting them on stage like trophies. And of course all the loyal Apple Maniacs went around repeating his NO FLASH mantra as if it were natural law.
I notice recently the anti-Flash hype within Apple has settled down to imperceptible...
The biggest argument made is that disk is cheaper for lots of storage. Well Flash is definitely not cheaper, but it does offer a different kind of convenience.
Say Apple sold a Flash player for $100 with minimal memory bundled but with an SD/CF slot.
Now, you can buy 1GB CF cards for arounnd $50 these days, and 1GB SD cards for around $60. And I've seen them go for $40 after rebate. Afvter rebate prices basically presage the sticker price in 4 months time...
So if you sell $100 iPods to "kids" or people who don't want to plunk down a larger bag of cash at once, then you can lock them in by selling them an "upgrade" 1GB (or the forthcoming 2Gb cards) for around $50 every few months.
Carrying around several SD cards is no big deal, they are tiny. You can get a caddy that holds 10Gb and is smaller than the end of your thumb.
Organizing different artists or genres on different cards also offers an easy, physical way for people to manage their collections without resorting to extreme tagging and playlist noodling.
One advantage of the Flash media model is also that the price of "upgrades" basically halves every 9 months or so. So if you don't want to add 5GB now, you can settle for adding only 1GB, knowing that in a year's time you could spend the same amount of money for another 2GB.
Consider also the possible business advantages of selling these low-end cards for Apple. The selling price of the cards could be subsidized by including bundled songs for a fee - a great way for record companies to distribute new music gratis. Or snippets of songs as adverts, jungles, or ringtones. This could lower the retail price of an Apple-branded "media card" by 10-20%.
Yes, even given the continued growth in capacity of flash media, they will never equal the price or capacity of hard disk media. However, at what point does enough space become too much? Lots of people seem to be happy with their iPod Minis, and they have a tiny capacity compared to some other options available.
It seems like lots of people are happy with just a few GB of music "on-hand" at any time. Hell, people get by with 256MB players! When and if Flash capacities reach the 4GB mark for $50 (I give it two years tops) then wouldn't a lot of the people who currently buy iPod Minis also consider a similar, half-priced iPod Flash?
That's a big market opportunity any way you slice it.
Of course, to really slim down Apple will have to do something about the iconic wheel interface. It's a nice design but it does take up a lot of front space on the device and constrains the screen size. Look at the iPod Photo - it's screen is lame and tiny ans resembles the old Archos Muldimedia players from a few years ago. At that time everyone lambasted them for releasing a "multimedia" player with such ridiculously tiny screens.
But Archos was just not thinking far ahead and went with maintaining their familiar audio jukebox interface. They learned from their mistake and upped the screen size on the newer models to take up most of the front panel.
What is the option for Apple? If they want to keep the wheel but shrinkthe devices *and* make the screen larger then they have to either A) put the wheel on the backside of the device, trusting users to navigate by touch, or B) convert the wheel into a software-simulation using on-screen display.
Apple has invested a lot of marketing collateral in their wheel design but it does constrain their effectiveness going forwward in a shrink of the iPod form factor for Flash sizes, especially for Asian markets where smaller is definitely much much better!
Da Blog
Where did this quote come from? If it was said by somebody at Creative, that shows a remarkable sense of hubris and entitlement that is out of place in a competitive marketplace.
Just because you were first major player in the MP3 player market doesn't mean you are entitled to stay there. Look at Apple, they were first to the mass market with a GUI-based computer, and they didn't maintain any dominance there, did they? Apple's not even your real enemy; their iTunes player supported the Rio series in the early days, and still supports many of them on the Mac platform. Apple chose the high end player space; Creative chose the low end. Apple got lucky this time around. No sense whining about it...
Those who complain about affect & effect on
You know Creative used to have a virtual monopoly on ugly pimpified mp3 players. For years iPod fashionistas were able to hew to the purity of the white form. Endless tedious column inches were spewed in blogs and media about the flawless design purity of the iPod. They were, of course, ignoring the popularity of variously coloured covers and after-market skins for the iPod. And the iPod's slow drift into chromism...
Then came the first rift in the iPod's White Power Ideology: the iPod Mini. Suddenly it was available in, let's face it, some pretty girly pastels and the Cult of iPod had to adapt to pay homage to this new reality.
But now there's the U2 iPod. Black and Red. A testament to gaudy ugliness. It's like the A-Team Van was recycled with go-faster stripes. It out-blacks the iRivers and out-pimps the Creatives. Apple has definitely made a land grab for the ugly mp3 territory. Creative can no longer claim the Ugly Throne.
Well done. I hope the iPod Flash comes in hot pink.
Da Blog
Tell me about it. I don't care if you call it Zen, HugePod, whatever.... it's about product in return for price. While Dell DJ and all these other brands are cutting closer, they need to do tank their prices the way Sega did to compete with EA sports.
Here me now, if a consumer can walk home with a 20GB Mp3 player for only $100, you are going to dominate the industry overnight.
Only one company (Sony) has the resources to do that easily. (They currently offer all three of those pieces.) Unfortunately, they are too mired in IP idiocy and bad design to have any chance at it. Don't expect this to change any time soon.
(Posted anonymously as I am a Sony employee.)
Apple's iPod dominates the MP3 player market because Apple made a player that was easy to use. No inner gizzards, no tricky new skills. Just a sleek, simple looking device that plays music. Most people don't really even know what an "MP3" is; certainly they don't know that the iPod plays AAC. Apple remains the master of selling comfort to the mass market, which is delivered with style as a method, not compensation for some defect (except perhaps the price). Let's see an "MP3" war between Creative and Apple, and may the easiest player win.
--
make install -not war
The ipod supports bookmarkable AAC files (mp3 too?? not sure), as well as audible (audiobook) files - http://www.audible.com/ - an no, I don't work for them.
I listen to lots of audio books on my iPod. The 'bookmarking' feature is one of the things that makes the iPod AWESOME to listen to books on. Basically, it automatically 'bookmarks' where you leave off.
So, if you want to stop in the middle of the book to go listen to some music, or whatever -- when you come back to your book, you pick up where you left off.
There are applescripts you can use to convert long mp3 files into bookmarkable AAC files too. Alternatively, if you rip in a file in AAC, it's pretty simple to switch on bookmarking in that file as well, using applescripts (there may even be an option in iTunes, I haven't checked). For example, I have some long comedy mp3s which I've turned on bookmarking for using some of the scripts.
Cheers
Hey, maybe what Apple's going to do is sell a flash player with a card slot, then sell preloaded flash cards. THAT would be a great idea for the industry. Slap in U2's new album, then slap in "1,000 metal hits," "1,000 easy listening tunes," etc.
:(
Just imagine the market for custom card mixes. Damn!
That would totally change the music industry.
I'm sure the Apple guys thought of it already. No patent for me
Funny, there was just something about it on macosxhints.com. This hint lets you have speed control and bookmarks with non-audible content:
0 41 114214939859
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20
Considering, "The worldwide corporate headquarters is located in Singapore" (Creative's Corporate Site) you can't really call it outsourcing (unless they outsourced management as well).
I think it's a Red State vs Blue State kind of thing. NC is a Red State, so you'll see a lot of the players with the WMA Ready sticker on them, whereas NY is a Blue State so you'll see more iPod's.
More likely, it's a public transportation thing.
People who take trains, busses and ferry boats to work were the first ones to buy Walkman radios back in the day. This is pretty much the same trend. Having headphones means not having to talk to the weirdo sitting next to you on the bus. Having an iPod instead of a radio means you won't lose the signal when you go through a tunnel. For somebody who spends two hours a day in such an environment, $400 probably doesn't seem like a lot of money to spend on making the time more pleasant.
People mostly drive to work in "Jesusland", so even when they listen to iPods during their commute, nobody else sees them.
Disclaimer: I live in the suburbs of a "light blue" state and drive to work. Nevertheless, I would rather go without the use of my legs than go without my iPod.
P.S. Not to nit-pick, but if you shade by percentage of victory in each district, and most states are actually solid purple. I think that people are making a little too much of "cultural differences" between the states.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
What the fuck was the point of your post?
First of all you were in tourist central, not to mention a major business district. So your little survey was most likely of tourists, businessmen, rich older women and kids going to the Disney store. You were 60 blocks away from the Apple store....
you know what, nevermind, I just want to wash your dumb ass post from my brain.
All the rumors about flash iPods have the word "cheap" in them somewhere. Now, everybody think back to the period before the iPod mini was released - remember all the rumors back then said the mini was going to be "cheap".
... and Apple sold a zillion of them.
What did we get? A smaller form factor, same storage as the original iPod, not "cheap"
People, Apple doesn't do cheap. The main reason Jobs dumps on flash MP3 players is they're too small - not enough room for a significant fraction of most people's music library. If there is anything to the flash iPod rumors, what do you bet it'll be a 4GB flash device, costing $250? And it'll be half the size of an iPod mini? And Apple will sell a zillion of them?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
No it will actually be: "Creative, Apple Battle for MP3 Player Market" as someone re-posts this article without checking for a previous submission.
iTunes does one important thing (though other programs can do this too) and that is create an index, a database, a file that contains information for all your songs, that is uploaded to the iPod that allows the iPod to function.
This index is the library file: Think of it as a card catalog in a library, or a directory at a mall, or a index in the back of a book. It allows the iPod to do three things: Be fast, efficient, and power thrifty.
Instead of scanning through the whole hard drive for ID3 info, it scans through an 11mb file stored in ram. This allows the iPod to be both fast and power thrifty when you're searching for a song, album, artist, or playlist.
As per copying the files and folders, you can copy them on and off the hard drive, because it's just a mass storage device. But going back to that index thing, iTunes (or another similar program) will copy the music into a specified Music folder so that the index and content are always in sync.
As per shuffling across a bunch of CDs, yes, you can do that.
You have one problem that would prevent you from being happy with the iPod: You want to do all the work and don't want the computer to do any of the work. By default iTunes will sort all your music by artist and album into their own folders:
Folder "John Coltrane" will contain folder "Blue Train" will contain all your music.
Then, with the iTunes interface, all you have to care about is: "Who is the artist?" or "What is the album?" or "What is the song?" or "What is the genre?" or "Who is the composer?" or "How many times has it been played?" or "What year was it recorded?"
That's the other thing about the index/database. iTunes uses it too, so if you want to, you have access to all your music in any myriad number of ways OTHER than artist-album.
GPL Deconstructed
Go retro, use a wax cylinder instead. Now that would be a statement.
You don't need a lab to make mud.
This is Creative's history of innovation...
Original SB:
Adding a gameport and DAC to the ADLIB FM synthesizer. This product was an incredible success, and got them very rich. Unfortunately they haven't done anything since besides let others innovate and then buy them out.
First PCI soundcard with SB compatibility was made by Ensoniq. Creative bought them out to get this technology.
First decent 3D soundcards were made by Aureal, which you already covered.
The chip in the SBLive was developed by EMU, which Creative bought out.
The Soundworks speakers had nothing to do with Creative until they bought them out.
The Aureal is still basically the same technology that's in the SBLive. I guess they ran out of innovative companies to buy out.
Unfortunately for Creative they can't exactly buy out Apple, so I'd say they're in trouble.
...and you can get back to me later on a promise I'll make: I'll kiss your ass on Main Street if and when you can demonstrate to me in the remotely near future that the iPod fails in the marketplace simply because it doesn't offer Ogg support, or likewise that any other portable audio device that has a slew of great features fails to make it in the marketplace because they don't offer Ogg support.
/. have made the case as to why Ogg matters to them and a few other folks. And that's fine, we all have wish lists. But the marketplace as a whole doesn't even know what Ogg is. I know close to thirty people that have iPods. I'd be shocked if any of them have heard of Ogg.
OK, I'm not trying to be a smart ass. I know a number of people on
It would absolutely blow my mind if Creative "brings this battle" because they "improve their Ogg support and offer it on more models." Nobody--or hardly anyone--cares.
Couldn't find a WinAmp plugin when I looked though... maybe there's one out there now.
1. I'm sure you're speaking figuratively, but for those who don't know, the Polish Cavalry didn't declare war, they were defending their country against invasion. "Going up against" might have been a better phrase.
2. Cavalry wasn't in fact obsolete in 1939 as is often made out. In fact, if you watch the newsreels of German troops entering Czechoslovakia in 1938 many are on horseback, with horse-drawn carts. The Polish cavalry of the time was similar, the units fought as dragoons, using the horses for transport (which was actually advantageous, as many of the roads in all of Eastern Europe were just unsurfaced mud tracks at the time, and vehicles would often get bogged down) and dismounting for battle. They used rifles, machine-guns and horse-drawn artillery. In fact the Polish cavalry had a particularly effective anti-tank gun.
3. The Panzers actually suffered considerable losses in the '39 campaign, the tanks were not the Tigers or Panthers of later years, but light tanks, and in the woods and fields of Poland often suffered at the hands of infantry and cavalry antitank weapons.
You might like to have a look at (for example, just a quick trawl through Google) this page or this one or this one or this one.
Ok, I used to be an Apple hater. I really didn't like the company, I didn't like the products, and I was sick and freakin tired of hearing that the iPod was the only good mp3 player in the world.
So, when I decided I wanted a portable hard drive and music player in one, I looked at everything EXCEPT the iPod. In fact, I flat out refused to buy an iPod. I looked at the iRiver, the iAudio, and the Creative Nomad. (does every player need an "i" in front of it?). And you know what happened? I couldn't find a single player that did the following: play music, mount as a USB mass storage device, and have an interface that didnt suck. They all either had a horrifyingly proprietary setup (needs drivers just to mount it as a drive), or they had an interface that was either crappy, or just plain cheap (I'm talking to you, iRiver).
Finally, my dad gave me an iPod for my birthday, and you know what? I couldn't find anything to whine about. It did everything I wanted it to do, and it's engineered really well, and it was smaller, to boot. It even made me have an open mind, and I've come to respect Apple products. What I'm trying to say is, yeah, the iPod isn't the only player on the market, and even I'm sick of hearing about it, but for god's sake, somebody, PLEASE, make an alternative that just plays music and acts as a hard drive. Is that too much to ask?
-Jay
love for open systems and rebellian against tyranny semms to be innate in me.
I see. That's why you had to wait for iRiver to add video support to your player, presumably in response to Apple upping the ante. That's not freedom, that's market competition. Unless you and I have different definitions of open systems. Or did I miss that day when iRiver went open-source?
You want freedom, try the really free open-source Rockbox. They even managed to add 30fps video playback to some of the 4-year-old Archos Jukeboxes, along with talking menu prompts, user bookmarking, and other goodies. And lucky for you, there's moves afoot to port the Rockbox code to at least some of the iRiver devices.
Da Blog
If Creative wants to get more of the market from the iPod they are going to have to do a few things, some of which they probably won't do, so the are doomed to fail from the start.
1. Quit making cheap, crappy players. Since they don't understand what makes the iPod so popular this one is going to be a big hurdle.
2. Better device firmware. If you have thousands of songs you need a easy way to manage and access those songs. Another big hurdle.
3. Design. They are hit and miss here. Make it cool like a mac, don't make it like a PC.
4. Mac Software. This one will kill them. Creative has missed so many opportunities to sell Mac product. Their outboard USB sound "cards" are a prime example. With just some simple software drivers their line of Exitgy and Audigy could have easily been Mac compatible. M-Audio is now making cash with basically the same thing. If they are not going to make Mac software then they will probably use some third party software like musicmatch for their PC jukebox software and not support the Mac at all.
With all the money they are throwing at it they could do it right....but past experience show, they won't.