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Critical Review of the Zune
ceallaigh writes "Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times has a critical review of the Zune. "Avoid," is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity."
At least with an Apple you can use it as a disk drive and use third party software to load it. People forget so fast that the first PC compatible iPods did not use iTunes but used Musicmatch. With the Zune you can't even mount it as a drive.
Yes, you can load music and video onto a Creative Zen Vision, Zen Vision M or Zen with Windows Media Player.
Personally I find the one year old, Creative Zen Vision, a far better iPod alternative. It has a 640by480 res screen,
30 GB HD, plays almost any video file downloadable (mpeg4, mpeg1, mpeg2, AVI, divx, xvid, mjpeg), allows you to read CF cards,
plays the radio, plays MP3's, Audible files and WMA files, record sound via a built in mic, plays also through an small external speaker,
allows you to view JPEGs and lets you output sound and video in full DVD quality to your TV and HT amp. It's a much better product, already out
for a year now.
The Chicago Sun Times is one of the biggest newspapers in the country. Possibly in the top three, definitely in the top ten. They are mainstream media.
That said, Andy is a former MacWorld columnist, who often supports Apple. His viewpoint can probably be considered somewhat biased. (Not that I don't agree with him, but I am also somewhat biased.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I am sick up to the nose with all these bad reviews that hit the web about the zune. I am an ipod dude. I own every single version since the first generation. I am an Apple fanboi. I love Apple products. Now, my g/f got me a brown zune just for the heck of it. I plugged the little guy into a PC laptop running XP. I had no problem updating the firmware or connecting to anything. I don't care about DRM. I have all my stuff in unprotected mp4 and that plays without any gliches on the zune. Of course there are some issues: gapless playback is my major issue. But knowing that Apple took 3 years to fix that on the iPod, I expect MS to take less time. I love the color brown. It is amazingly beautiful in real life with green contours. No picture can do the translucency of the material justice. I also have to admit that WMA sounds great on my stereo at 128Kps. The UI is really kickass and I never cared about the wheel because it's so imprecise anyway that I always missed the thing I wanted to click on. There are no games, and I don't care because I have a cell phone with java. There are no calendar and stuff that are useless because my cell phone sync up with blutooth. So the Zune is mostly here for music and some videos. The screeen is just better to watch anything. I can run the zune with a PC powered USB by just closing the zune app on the desktop. I never could do that on the Mac. The zune app looks fine. The sync is working great and I never really cared about Windows Media player anyway. This is the first release, MS is losing money on it, so basically I suspect that Wifi doesn't cost the customers one dime. I am also interested to see what comes up from MS later on, and what are other going to hack on the device. I just don't understand what all this negative press is about really.
This doesn't sound like something I want.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
This is not a review from PCWorld. It's a writer with the Chicago Sun-Times giving advice to parents for the holiday buying season.
The purpose of the review is not to give geeks a rundown of every single feature and whether it performs as expected. The purpose is to inform the reader about whether this is even a worthwhile product, given all the hype that surrounds it.
The reviewer did point out other options that don't suck as much as the Zune and are cheaper. So he's done his job in giving the average consumer an idea about whether this is a worthwhile product... just as a movie reviewer in the same paper would give you an idea about whether ANYONE should consider going to a particular movie. Most movies have some demographic that might enjoy watching it... but the same is not true for technology products, which may or may not even work as expected. There were at least two features the reviewer pointed out that do not work as expected, given the way they are portrayed on the box.
So it looks like the Zune isn't even worth considering. I'm glad that reviewer was honest enough to say so.
"If they don't they loose to Apple and they will never gain their monopoly status in Content Rights Management (CRM)."
You post was in general, quite good, and well thought out, but, the word you're looking for in these two sentences is lose not loose.
A shoestring is loose if it is not tied tightly. If it falls out of the shoe into the lake, you lose it forever.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Here is a good one, this is a CNN review of the Zune
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buKaqRG2SFA&mode=r
It turns into an ad for the new ipod shuffle. It is hilarity.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Your comments about Windows are spot-on, but this time it's different.
The market for portable music players is not the same as the preloaded OEM software "market", nor are they entering a vacuum.
This time MS needs to make a good product that will stand on its own merits, or they'll bleed red ink until the shareholders tell 'em to quit.
The 1G iPod was only 5GB and mac-only. The 2G added Windows support but the solid-state click wheel made the battery life go to hell.
Considering I have a 1G iPod sitting right next to me that has always worked with Windows, I'm going to go ahead and say you're full of shit, but I've already noticed that from the other replies you've made to this article.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
There's usually a fee for every authorization performed as well, so it'll be a fixed cost + 3% in total.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
You can easily transfer music from your iPod to your computer now, too - Apple saw the light and added that a few months/revisions ago.
This space intentionally left blank.
According to Apple that only works with songs purchased from iTunes Store and authorized computers. I hope people's music collections are not made up of mostly iTunes Store songs.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Buy Korean. iRiver, Cowon, and Samsung's players all do Ogg Vorbis, and I'm sure others do too.
You should have looked at the Creative Zen Vison M or the Creative Zen Vision W. Both support Audible and PlayForSure.
But the best thing about these two players is their Divx and Xvid support. No need to re-convert video, like the Zune or Ipod.
for information ... the iPod DOES support OGG (iPodLinux)
Of course, as is so often the case with Linux, it only supports iPods that haven't been sold for a couple three years. Oh, and scroll down on that page - it doesn't support Ogg Vorbis. It only supports WAV, MP3, and AAC. It doesn't support DRM'd AAC files either.
My question: What the fuck is the point other than for geeks to masturbate themselves? What's so cool about crippling an obsolete player?
The only thing that would be cool is if it supported high bitrate recording, but no dice on my iPod. I suspect that it will about the same time the HURD kernel supports USB.
A small registry hack so one can copy data off the Zune
http://www.zunehack.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=7
Under OS X I always used Cog http://cogosx.sourceforge.net/ to play music and just switched to Play http://sbooth.org/Play/. Both play Ogg Vorbis just fine. I believe there is a plugin to let iTunes play Ogg Vorbis. VLC can play music but is actually a videoplayer and its UI never ceases to remind you of it.
No, AAC is not locked in with Apple. It is part of the MP4 standard and the successor to MP3 (it is also known as MP4). All it has over MP3 (other than being higher quality at the same file size and support for more channels/bitrates/bitdepths) is that it ha mechanisms to allow for DRM. That said, AACs you encode yourself are DRM-less. Songs you buy from the ITS have Fairplay DRM (which is Apple's DRM). All none DRMd AACs will play in a Zune without modification (and several other players). While it is not open source (like .ogg), it is not any more closed source than .MP3 (how many of you out there know that media player makers have to play royalties to Thompson, etc. for the use of .MP3?)
I honestly don't know why AAC has not caught on more - it is so much more "open" than WMA, an has MUCH more broad support than .ogg.
-- .sigs are for suckers
MOD PARENT UP!
How is this flamebait? The GP is obviously a fairly well-informed technical person who tries to make intelligent choices about technology and standards and stuff... and yet, as the parent points out, the GP has chosen to keep all his music in a totally proprietary locked-down Microsoft format.
I'd say the parent's comments are entirely appropriate...
My bicyles
Just ensure the copy to library (or keep library organized) option is enabled in the iTunes preferences and then just drag and drop the folder or files into iTunes... The files will be automatically be copied to the library...
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
You were just trolling. iPodLinux runs GREAT on my Nano AND gives me the ability to run MAME on top of OGG support. Newer iPods just aren't supported as with "most open source projects" - the older releases are official ... the newer are "unofficial"
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
60*60*24*365 = 31536000 seconds. 128 Mbps, that's megaBITS per second, is 128 * 1024 / 8 = 16384 bytes per second, or 16k/second, or 0.015625 MEGABYTES per second.
This times that renders 481 GIGAbytes, not TERAbytes.
And I actually do have a music collection that large, however it's because I ripped all my CDs into non-DRM lossless format (ALAC). Which plays on the iPod and sounds (and I can say this with 100% confidence) better than WMA or MP3 or AAC whatever the bitrate, and I don't need a fancy spectral analysis or double-blind experiment to prove it. And if anyone anywhere ever changes the encoding format on whatever device I buy in the future, I'm sure to lose absolutely nothing during the inevitable transcode. Mmmmyep, feels good to be smug. :)
But SRSLY, folks - the whole era of music compression format wars is starting to get just a little bit irrelevant, when we've got bic-sized devices that hold 200 minutes of non-lossy audio and 400GB hard drives on sale for $100 online.
I've been watching the ranking of the black Zune on Amazon's Bestsellers list and it has been dropping like a stone since its introduction. I first saw it in the top 30, then in the top 40, top 50 and now it is down to #93. This doesn't bode well for a new product. If it was really good, it would be climbing up into the top 10. Right now there are 5 iPods in the top 10 list and iPods take up positions 1, 2 and 3. There are three other non-iPod mp3 players in the top 25. At this rate, the Zune will fall from the top 100 list soon.