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No App Store For Microsoft's Zune HD
Xerfas writes 'Microsoft's Zune HD, set to go on sale Tuesday, will not feature an open application store like its competitor the iPod Touch. It will come with some unique features, though, like an HD radio tuner, and with software that has been well-received by users. Those capabilities will determine whether the ZuneHD sells well — and whether Microsoft decides to keep selling its own music player, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft.' The Zune marketing manager was quoted in the Seattle Times on whether the Zune would open up for 3rd-party apps, and he gave a response of such mind-numbing PR-speak that John Gruber of Daring Fireball was moved to provide this English translation: "No, because our mobile strategy is a convoluted mess."
No App Store For Microsoft's Zune HD
I only read the Q&A on the blog linked but I did catch this:
All of our apps are free ... and it's a managed solution right now, so we're building these apps or working with third parties to build these apps and provide them to our customers for free.
Followed by:
That being said, we know people want things like this on their devices so we're going to build them ourselves, they're going to be super high-quality, and they're going to be free.
It sounds like you'd have a hard time getting third parties to release applications on the Zune given the above aims. Now, free apps are great but I don't think a store would have much of a purpose if everything there is free. Regardless, I expect this to fail with a 95% chance of that. The biggest influence that "we're going to build them ourselves" means a very very tight bandwidth for incubating games followed by literally mods of older games to take place in a different setting or tweaked to read "Spiderman" instead of "Superman." Gamers don't normally fall for that although your general populace might. And if I want to create a game "with" them what do I do? Get in line behind Project Gotham racing?
I don't think convoluted's a good criticism but it's certainly a poor or doomed strategy in my opinion.
My work here is dung.
No. Thankfully I can play at less than ~100dBA.
A recording of someone singing, accompanied by an acoustic guitar, will be far less that 100db. Of course, add a drum or a clarinet and you're in the ear-splitter range.
No, I would not. It does not have the ambience of a stadium and the feeling of over 1000 people around me.
See above; have you never been in a small club or bar with few patrons and a bluegrass band? If not, you should. Or heard someone just play a piano or guitar in a living room?
I am so sick and tired of "LP is analog therefore better"
Not better, but higher fidelity. Analog and digital both have their strong and weak points. Digital's weak point is frequency response and aliasing, analog's weak points are noise and a lower dynamic range, although few CDs use its effective dynamic range well.
With only three samples per crest, CD's 44khz sampling rate is simply not good enough; in a CD there is no difference between a sawtooth wave or a square wave or a sine wave. If they upped the sampling rate ten fold, I would guess that a recording like that would completely blow any analog media out of the water. But that was the best they could do with the technology at the time CDs were developed.
Free Martian Whores!
For me, having a phone with GPS and internet capability means jack shit, because I'll need to climb that mountain over there to see enough of the sky for the dinky little antenna on the phone to get a GPS signal, and I'll need to hike three ridgelines over to get line-of-sight to a cell tower.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
That depends on your requirements, wishes and habits so I can only speak for myself.
My HTC Touch HD together with the software I use performs somewhere between "good enough for casual use" and "dear god, this is a dream come true".
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap