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Sony takes on iPod Shuffle
Ben writes "It seems that Sony has decided to take on Apple with a low cost flash based player that will go up against the Shuffle.
Pocket-lint has
the low down on some of the stats,
as does the BBC and Engadget." The major improvement in my eyes is that some models have an FM tuner.
IMHO they look like every other flash drive, apart from the circular one. It doesn't matter, I reckon Apple will be laughing all the way to the bank here - the press are describing it as "Sony takes on Apple's IPOD shuffle" - ie: they're already the de-facto standard in a market that's 2 months old.
The other comment is - what on earth are Sony smoking - they really need to learn about branding - the models are the NW-E103, NW-E105, NW-E107, NW-E405, NW-E407, NW-E505, NW-E507. Apart from 'bigger numbers are better' (which is a guess), what does that tell me ? What are the distinctions between them ? both in-range and between the ranges (presuming the E1xx, E4xx and E5xx are 3 distinct ranges).
Even I get this, and I write s/w for a living. You'd have thought someone in the highly-paid 'marketing director' position would have a clue too.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Never understood why all these rival players seem to include FM radios, if I wanted an FM radio I could use the one built in my phone (not sure what FM is doing in a phone either) but I never do because the quality on the move has never been that brilliant.
If they want to include a radio at least include a DAB one (the digital radio service in the UK).
For me, the inclusion or addition of an FM tuner to an mp3 player has now become a negative rather than a plus. My experience has been the FM tuners are all pretty bad, and so the only conclusion I can draw is the FM tuner has been added solely for the sake of making it more attractive, not enhancing the quality of the user experience. So, more circuitry, more electronics to support a poorly implemented FM tuner just means more things to go wrong with the device.
The major improvement in my eyes is that some models have an FM tuner.
Well, I guess that's -kind- of like the shuffle... I mean, you still know exactly what songs are going to be played, you just don't know the order.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Dang it, why is it so hard to find an MP3 player with a decent AM radio built in? I keep my portable AM radio in my pocket right next to my mp3 player and it has no problem with interference when the MP3 part is turned off. I use it to listen to baseball games... would be nice to have it all on one device.
Ok is this the Music Sony we hate, or the Gaming Sony we Love... It's electronics, but it has to do with music. Arrrgh I don't know if I should love this or hate this. Somebody tell me I can't think on my own.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
I bought my iRiver iHP-140 40GB player because it had a tuner and ogg support. The only other one I considered was one with a built-in FM transmitter, but that thing was a brick and seemed to have supply issues. You'd think for the cost of the iPod (twice what mine cost) it would at least have a tuner.
It conforms to NO Human Interface Guidelines at all, it has huge amounts of extremely choppy and pointless animations and is such a CPU hog that it doesn't respond even when the only application open on a 2.6GHz P4 laptop. Quite unbelievable.
Now if I could sync it with iTunes, that would be another matter.
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We can only pray that it goes as well as it did the last time Sony took on an iPod.
However, as we all know, Sony are a music company too which means that however great this is, they'll crippled or fudge it up in some spectacular way meaning that, yet again, it'll be a flop.
My guess is that it'll be the required usage of SonicStage.
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yeah, something about video killing its star.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
As a retirement gift this week, the ousted Sony CEO (Nobuyuki Idei) was given an iPod of all things! He didn't find it very funny considering he is famous for declining Apple's offer to participate in the iTunes music store.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Every month, someone "takes on" an iPod. The next month, we don't hear about them again.
FM tuner? I can buy one of those as an accessory add-on thanks to the burgeoning "iPod economy," as Jobs puts it. I even have that FM broadcaster that lets me dial into the frequency with my car radio to hear my iPod through my car speakers without any special hookups.
I don't see Sony's player going anywhere. They feature a display, which Apple abandoned as being pointless in a tiny flash player (and they're right). And it's still more expensive.
A 70 hour battery life on a AAA? A 3 minute quick charge that lasts 3 hours and at max charge 50? These are things that some people look for and can use. Those are insane battery life spans for something like this will be a real selling point. The IPod Shuffle only offers up to 12 hours at most currently. I can't remember how many times I've tried to turn on my MP3 player only to find it was dead, having forgoten to put it on the charger or replace the battery. With lifespans like these, one would only need to recharge once a week in most cases, vs. once every day or two for the shuffle.
Now all we need to do is find out if the audio quality is just as good.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
The iPod isn't a blazing success because of technical superiority; the iPod isn't a blazing success because of crazy mad features. The iPod is a success because it does what it was designed to do very, very well--better than the players that boast eternal battery life, radio tuners, wireless, video playback, more storage, more audio formats, lower prices, and smaller packages.
It's about finding the right balance--and based on what I'm seeing, I don't think that Sony's upcoming offering will succeed at striking that balance.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
The problem with AM is two fold. First, the wavelengths are much longer, so the small antennas can't pick them up as well. Second, AM has to have the amplitude of the signal preserved perfectly during amplification or you get distortion in the audio quality. In FM you can distort the hell out of the original signal, you just care about the fruency it is at. This makes AM tuners harder to implement than FM tuners.
It's more a problem of the technology behind AM than anything else. Not that they don't want to implement it.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I'm convinced that every time some product is touted as the "iPod Killer" it's destined to be a flop. This Sony design won't be any different.
Why do people buy a flash music player like the Shuffle? To listen to music. The problem with competing with the Shuffle is that it serves one purpose and does it well. Trying to compete with it on features can easily raise the price so that it's no longer price competitive.
The other big reason is that the Shuffle is being driven by the success of the iTunes Music Store. Any other player doesn't work with the most popular online music store. Any player that wants to compete with the iPod has to either play iTMS songs (which Apple won't do for obvious reasons) or have a music store that's better than the iTMS. So far none of the competition even comes close. They either have horrible interfaces, bloated prices, or draconian DRM -- and most of the time they have all three.
Unless Sony can not only create a flash player that's cheaper, but a music store that's better, they're not going to put much of a dent in the iPod's sales figures. Personally, I don't see Sony doing either of these things.
The iPod Shuffle works because it's small, cheap, stylish, has the benefit of iTunes' excellent UI, and works with the iTunes Music Store. The Sony player is Yet Another Flash Player, and it won't sell necessarily better than an iRiver, Rio, etc. would.
...The iPod, in any incarnation, has three advantages going for it: style, ease of use, and iTunes integration. The iPod Shuffle is no exception. 256MB MP3 players are plenty common these days; Sony's competing with them, not with the iPod Shuffle. The only real similarity it has to the iPod is the form factor.
I know that iTunes integration is something only Apple can do, but if you can get the ease-of-use going, then you can at least sport Microsoft integration. And somehow, nobody gets the ease-of-use thing working. They keep thinking that they can beat Apple on price, which isn't really relevant now that Apple has a $100 iPod. Sure, you can make another MP3 player for $50 or $75, but it doesn't take long to compare features and decide the extra $25 or $50 is worth it.
Get it right, manufacturers -- your target is ease-of-use, not price or size. The iPod has proved that there are enough people who will pay for quality (and fashion, I'll admit it) to make it worth catering to them.
Obviously sony isn't about to challenge the shuffle with a unit running 200 pounds+. Their real shuffle competition is $150 US, has a gig of space, and a display. It needs a AAA battery to run but does NOT have FM radio.
clicky
I don't see this as an improvement, if radio had any quality programming we wouldn't need iPods.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
I do believe we now have a new theory of the universe: The Pop Music Uncertainty Principal
You can know what station is playing crap, but not in what order.
Or, you know now what crap will be played, but not on which station.
This explains a lot...
Blockwars: free, multiplayer, Tetris like game.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Apple has always shied away from features it doesn't want enabled in their product but which are supported by the hardware. For example, all iPods since 3rd gen have been able to play WMA! But Apple never enabled it. The original iPod OS can control FireWire CD Burners - Apple never enabled that feature. It would be trivial (and cost nearly nothing) to add an FM Tuner to the entire iPod range, but Apple thinks (right IMO) that people buy Music players, not radios, and complicating a product with extra unused features is not a good thing.
In fact, looking at the original iPod to the Click Wheel iPod, apart from the Click Wheel itself, what has changed about the way you interact and use the player? Actually very little, when you think about it.
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Insightful? Do you think the iPods would have become popular if they weren't really easy to use and had a great interface?
Jesus. Not everybody is a slave to fashion. I hate when people say that they're bought because they're cool. They BECAME cool because they work better than anything else out there for the majority of people's use.
Actually, Kudos should go to Apple for truly thinking outside the box.
Until the shuffle came along, most flash-based player manufacturers thought "People need to see what song they are listening to" and thus tried to cram a poor interface with display on a tiny gadget. But Apple said "let the interface be clean and simple, and let there be new no display -- and there was no display". "Let the users listen to songs that they like, and they listened to songs that they liked, whether it was in a playlist order or a random order -- they still liked the songs."
I didn't think I'd like the iPod shuffle without a screen, but I wanted a flash-based player (& iTunes support).
Having had a shuffle since Macworld, I can say it is the only player I use (I also have a 20GB iPod). Screen? Don't really need the screen.
And here's a tip -- ONLY ADD THE SONGS YOU WANT TO HEAR!! Then it doesn't matter if it is in playlist mode or shuffle mode, you'll always be listening to songs that you like.
iPod Shuffle 512M -- $99
NW-E405 512M -- $130
NW-E505 512M+FM -- $150
iPod Shuffle 1G -- $150
NW-E407 1G -- $180
NW-E507 1G+FM - $200
iPod Mini 4G -- $200
I went to my local Fry's electronics and checked out flash based MP3 players. Fry's, in case you don't know, is a huge store that carries most anything computer or electronics related (with several exceptions - but for flash players they pretty much have it all). They had a wall of flash players and not one of them was a better deal than the iPod shuffle when you compare price and megabytes of storage. Most were in the $50 - $70 and had either 32MB to 128 MB of storage. At $99 for 512MB, the iPod shuffle seems to me like a better deal.
For what its worth, I saw several people crowded around the Shuffle and other iPods and no one around the other players which were in a different area of the store.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
iTunes and the integration and user experience is what drives the buzz, which is what drives the iPod sales. Had the iPod been as clunky as other players, do you really think iPod owners would gush about them?
People might get it because other have told them they should, but WHY are people saying that? Because they've used it and realized yes, this is how it should be - simple, elegant, and It Just Works.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
For a long time Sony has sold on its brandname, while it's products have started to suck in both quality and functionality/components. In this market though, Apple has brand recognition in the high ground. Sony might be able to snag a few fanboys, but I hope that they eventually catch a clue and realize that selling an overpriced player with less features (in this case less storage) is not going to gain them many fans.
One huge problem that any IPod competitor will face is the natural lock-in of ITunes. If I bought an IPod and bought a few albums through the music store, I'm pretty much stuck with my IPod unless I want to buy the music over again. Sony can't even get away with providing some sort of import tool because it would violate the DMCA.
Sure, there are tools to decrypt these files, but many of the average ipod users don't have a clue about that stuff. If they consider an IPod competitor, they'll be informed that their music won't carry over and they'll get another IPod.
It's the same game Microsoft plays if on a different scale. Everybody needs windows to run the software they bought and it's too expensive to change to a different operating system because you have to get all new software.
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