All I can say is "meh". And I'm not one to use that word lightly.
What about the 95% of iPod users who have never bought a track from the iTunes music store? Why would we switch? Or the 95% of the rest of the world that still has all their music on CD and doesn't have any player? Why deal with WMP, one of the crappiest pieces of software out there, along with URGE, the only music store I've ever tried to use that literally does not even work on any PC I try it on?
The point is as Sony proved to us, it's not just the IDEA of having a big connected "ecosystem" that's attracted people to the iPod, it's the execution. Sony tried the same thing MS is now trying and they failed just as spectacularly as MS will.
I don't really see wi-fi being a very big deal in a music player, because it doesn't really have anything to do with the way people actually use music players. Think about it. Either you use wi-fi at home or you use it outside, at a hotspot. So, let's take the hotspot - am I really going to think of a song I want to download out of the blue, then head on over to Starbucks or something just to download it? No. Now, let's think of how people use their players at home. Most people connect their players to their PC's to charge them - in fact, with a lot of players (specifically newer iPods), it's the only way to do so out of the box. Given that, what does wi-fi give me? I still need to plug the damn thing in to charge it. This is a non-feature if you ask me. It's also going to lead to messy libraries (because it decentralizes the library from the PC), and the fact is most people with portable music players aren't downloading their music anyway, but that's almost beside the point.
Honestly, guys, it's game over and it has been for a long time. Until there's another paradigm shift in the way we use media, nobody's going to dethrone Apple. If Sony couldn't do it, MS is not gonna do it either. MS has even less experience in entertainment devices, and their track record in software (from a useability standpoint) is less than stellar. Worse, WMP10 is already available - so we already have half the equation to look at here - and it's junk. Whether you like iTunes or not. I mean, take all the bad things about iTunes and magnify them about 100 times, then add on negatives like having to manually set up your own music stores (which means another, separate download). That's what we're dealing with here.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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All I can say is "meh". And I'm not one to use that word lightly.
What about the 95% of iPod users who have never bought a track from the iTunes music store? Why would we switch? Or the 95% of the rest of the world that still has all their music on CD and doesn't have any player? Why deal with WMP, one of the crappiest pieces of software out there, along with URGE, the only music store I've ever tried to use that literally does not even work on any PC I try it on?
The point is as Sony proved to us, it's not just the IDEA of having a big connected "ecosystem" that's attracted people to the iPod, it's the execution. Sony tried the same thing MS is now trying and they failed just as spectacularly as MS will.
I don't really see wi-fi being a very big deal in a music player, because it doesn't really have anything to do with the way people actually use music players. Think about it. Either you use wi-fi at home or you use it outside, at a hotspot. So, let's take the hotspot - am I really going to think of a song I want to download out of the blue, then head on over to Starbucks or something just to download it? No. Now, let's think of how people use their players at home. Most people connect their players to their PC's to charge them - in fact, with a lot of players (specifically newer iPods), it's the only way to do so out of the box. Given that, what does wi-fi give me? I still need to plug the damn thing in to charge it. This is a non-feature if you ask me. It's also going to lead to messy libraries (because it decentralizes the library from the PC), and the fact is most people with portable music players aren't downloading their music anyway, but that's almost beside the point.
Honestly, guys, it's game over and it has been for a long time. Until there's another paradigm shift in the way we use media, nobody's going to dethrone Apple. If Sony couldn't do it, MS is not gonna do it either. MS has even less experience in entertainment devices, and their track record in software (from a useability standpoint) is less than stellar. Worse, WMP10 is already available - so we already have half the equation to look at here - and it's junk. Whether you like iTunes or not. I mean, take all the bad things about iTunes and magnify them about 100 times, then add on negatives like having to manually set up your own music stores (which means another, separate download). That's what we're dealing with here.