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 Friday, March 10, 2006

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iPod Envy

Here is the deal.

For over a year now I’ve been trying to look for a device that is > the iPod. In that time Apple has constantly moved the needle forward in a number of areas. We are still far behind, and in all likelihood, when we catch up, Apple will have something like this.

  • Design
    • The new generation of iPods and Nano are smaller, prettier and more feature rich
    • All iPods have a readable color screen with album art
    • The UX  and Interaction Design are still better than anything out there
      • I’d argue that the Portable Media Center has a much better and more usable interface, but it doesn’t matter when you can’t buy it or when the OEM screws it up with their agenda (like jog dial or some nonsense).
  • Features
    • The iPod has such new features as an FM radio remote
    • There are about 100,000 new accessories that have appeared since I started looking for a replacement. many of this are just awesome.
  • Pervasiveness
    • Staying at the W Hotel? forgot your iPod charger or Sync cable? They have some for you to borrow in the same way they have plug converters if you are in a foreign country. Have some cryptically named Philips device with a massive brick? You are out of luck.
    • Staying at your friend’s house and forgot your iPod charger? Yeah, well they have a charger too.

I’m beginning to change my mind about things. Even though we have a great eco system for music stores etc, the reality is that our OEM partners are never ever going to create a product like the iPod. They are simply no match for the iPod Dock Connector, which as generated an ecosystem of hardware that’s probably more lucrative than the online music business. 

Game over.

I’m not such a zealot that I’m simply going to go out of my way to make myself miserable when the answer is probably an iPod. I don’t sync my music very often (like once a month) so using iTunes might not be so bad (eeek I can’t believe I said that). All I have to do is have my pc transcode all my music to mp3 or aac in a few days.

For now I’m going to hold out for the Gigabeat S. But if it’s big and ugly and has crappy battery life or a bad FM radio I’m out. I’m 90% of the way there. I’m also going to hold out for urge.com and Windows Media Player 11. But if any of these things suck, I’m off to the Apple Store to smack down a few hundred on some bling bling.

[update: I gave in and got a nano and I love it]

Digital Audio | Gear
Posted Saturday, March 11, 2006    Permalink    Comments [12]  View blog reactions

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Saturday, March 11, 2006 6:59:53 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Why is the proprietary “iPod Dock Connector” interface for an MP3 player a good thing? Ohh, that’s right, it’s good for Apple, not the consumer. When just about every PC made has USB and Firewire interfaces, we needed Apple to come up with yet another standard.

I have been sync’ing my five year old Creative Labs Jukebox player using USB and I can use that same cable to sync/charge my cell phone and my external micro drive.

I can’t wait until people come to their senses and realize they shouldn’t be buying monolithic MP3 players and that that they should have a single device to handle everything from mobile voice, IM, video playback, music player, etc … wait, that sounds like a modern mobile phone.
xorshift
Saturday, March 11, 2006 11:04:13 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
As you well know, iPod's permeate Microsoft campuses everywhere. And as you say above, they've always been one (or more) steps ahead of our OEM partners. Sucks, but it's true. I don't blame any employee for buying the superior product...even if it isn't ours.

I went with a buddy (also co-worker) over to the Apple store at RTC and I must admit the Nanos are really nice. They have awesome screen resolution for such a small size! I have a Creative Muvo N200 (512mb) and it's fine for me. It has FM radio (which iPod didn't at the time I bought it) and sounds really good. Although I appreciate the photo sharing capabilities of the Nano it's not something I really need.

Good luck!
tod
Saturday, March 11, 2006 5:45:56 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I struggled with this decision as well, and last year ended up pickup up an iPod 30GB video. Sure there are plenty of things that bother me about the iPod (eg. trapped by iTunes) but the pros outweigh the cons. Like you i'm holding out for the Toshiba Gigabeat S as well, praying that another OEM isn't going to screw things up.
Trevin
Saturday, March 11, 2006 6:36:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Admit it: You're just getting bored, and want to gadget flip. I bet if you get an iPod, within six months, you'll have something else again.
Mike Kozlowski
Saturday, March 11, 2006 6:41:00 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
You sound like you know me or something :-).
Omar Shahine
Sunday, March 12, 2006 5:00:49 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Not that I'm complaining, mind. It's nice to have someone out there reviewing all these nifty gadgets in a day-to-day usability sense instead of just the CNet-style rundown of the spec sheet.

FWIW, I did the "iPod surrender" move a while back. I was disgusted with my wife's iRiver H320 (for basically the same reasons you hated it), I'd bought and returned one of the first-gen PMCs (too bulky, sound quality was terrible), and was frustrated by the suckiness of everything out there. So I broke down and bought the damn iPod, feeling dirty and shamed on the inside.

And then The iPod is the irony hit: I couldn't get it to sync. I installed iTunes (cringing the whole time at its godawful UI), had it copy my WMA Lossless music archive to Apple Lossless (wincing about the proprietary jail that I was putting my music into), plugged the iPod in... and nothing. I spent three hours trying to make it work, deploying the considerable technical skill I possess, and was unsuccessful.

I considered it fate, and in retrospect, I'm glad it didn't work.
Mike Kozlowski
Sunday, March 12, 2006 1:53:19 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I have an older generation 40GB iPod with a sucky battery that I never use. Instead, I travel with 1 or 2GB SD cards for my windows mobile phone. I've got compressed movies, TV shows and music along with maps (for pocket streets and trips), word & excel docs, etc than can all travel with me!

Btw, you are not tied to iTunes. I (used to) use winamp & their iPod plug-in to sync - granted, this is probably no better for a died-in-the-wool MS employee :) iTunes has never touched my machine!
John Peltonen
Monday, March 13, 2006 8:48:08 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Keep in mind that Microsoft holds the patent to the iPod clickwheel... ;-)
Robert Hoover
Monday, March 13, 2006 8:56:12 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I bit the bullet and bought a nano a while back. Actually, the day they were announced. I've gone through at least 8 or 9 players before and the sad fact is that nothing can compare to the ipod for well thought out functionality. iTunes 6 handles my 110+gb mp3 collection without any problems, something WMP wont do. iTunes 5 crawled with it before before so they've made some vast improvements there. I keep thinking the podcast support could be better but at the end of the day, it works well enough for what I need. The video support in iTunes sucks, since most of my stuff isnt in Quicktime, so if I go with video player it probably wont be an iPod. However I'll make due without one since nobody has a portable video player that I really like yet. I might just go with an ultraportable windows machine instead for that purpose.

However, now that I've drunk the Apple Kool-Aid I am looking at things like Airport Express for routing music around my house. But my house is small and my laptop can connect to a set of speakers for music already.
william
Monday, March 13, 2006 10:11:16 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I really wanted to like using my Windows Mobile phone as my player, I really did. But the audio quality was horrible, plus it would skip/stutter while the phone was doing something else, then there is the fact that I either have to use the crappy headphones that came with the phone, or some bulky headphone adapter. No thanks.

I bought the Nano's last fall and have not looked back. Am I locked into iTMS for online music purchases, yes. Is that all that bad? I dunno. The selection blows away any of the PlaysForSure-based stores, though last I looked at Napster it wasn't that bad. My only beef - pricing. I'd gladly pay a monthly all-you-can-eat fee ala Napster & Yahoo! but I also listen to a lot of music.

Also, you are right about the ecosystem. Think you can get a cheap third party AC adapter for you Dell DJ/Creative whatever/Toshiba Gigabeat? Think again. Think Honda/Acura, Mercedes, or VW/Audi/Seat is going to offer an "iRiver" interface such that the head unit controls the device, and in some cases displays the song info? Think again (though the Acura interafce in my TL doesn't do song info).

Do I get razzed when in the office (I work in a MS field office), hell yes. Quote from one colleague, "I hear if Balmer see those white headphones on campus he litterally will walk over and rip them off you head and throw them in the trash." Nonetheless, I'm not the only one here listening.
Derek
Tuesday, March 14, 2006 2:34:07 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
To be quite honest, I've never understood why using an iPod and iTunes is somehow an antithesis for Microsoft users. iTunes runs on Windows. I never could get why Microsoft felt, in addition to consoles, desktop operating systems, enterprises, office suites, instant messaging, search engines, marketplace services, and more, that it needed to have digital media players too. Microsoft should have been working with Apple the past five years to have iTunes and iPod integration built right into every copy of Windows. Windows is supposed to be the dominant platform, after all...why does Microsoft then try to kill the people running on that platform? Besides the lunacy of it, the strategy is obviously not working anyway...
Preston Sumner
Thursday, March 16, 2006 12:25:31 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
As much as my love my iPod (third generation and still ticking, woot!)...Don't save your files as acc...MP3 is a damn good format and works on all players. That way, if you decide you like a device other than the iPod later on you'll find that you can just drag and drop the MP3s. No company (besides Sony) is crazy enough to drop MP3 from their device, and I think that would be a much wiser option for you.

If iTunes doesn't do the thing for you, there are always other great options out there such as SharePod and even a plugin that lets you sync it with Windows Media Player ( http://www.jakeludington.com/ask_jake/20050816_sync_ipod_with_windows_media_player_10.html ). There's even a plugin for Winamp if you like that as well.

I've hoped that I've helped. In the end I hope you find a good player for you no matter what brand it is. :)





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