ZUNE/X360 connection pics...

Mentok

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http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/09/zune-player-store-accessores-and-xbox-360-hands-on/

For those interested in getting the ZUNE...

zune_event_26.jpg


zune_event_42.jpg
 
The Whisky? :dry:

Also, the screen looks much bigger than I thought it'd be. :up:

I might get rid of my iPod nano for one of these if a friend gets one that I can try out first.
 
yeah, the zunes look really good, I was also planning to get rid of my ipod for this but I want to know how good it is from other peoples opinion first
 
iPods are a bandwagon of bad technology and a shining symbol of Apple's jackassful self-exclusivity. Battery life of two years... kiss my ass.
 
That was actually a good move. IBM couldn't deliver the chips that Apple needed, and Intel could. That, and G5's don't let you market how your machines can run MacOS X and Windows like Core Duo's do.
 
They were working on that OS switch for a long time before that happened. OSX can run on both hardware sets.
 
The Ether said:
yeah, the zunes look really good, I was also planning to get rid of my ipod for this but I want to know how good it is from other peoples opinion first

Wait for the second gen ZUNE. This one is an old model from another company just with a different case and new software.

Still, it does have a widescreen and if thats a factor then get it and skip the ipod.

Its not that the ZUNE is a bad product, its just that it could have been much better.
 
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2006/tc20061110_107049.htm

Zune: Falling Down on Cool
Sure, Microsoft's music player will build a base, even among some iPod users—but it can't hold a candle to the iPod in the way that matters most

by Arik Hesseldahl

As much as I like my iPod—I've owned three or four over the years—I've had to come to terms with the unpleasant fact that not everyone does.

My best friend is one of those people. His music player is a little Creative (CREAF) Muvo and there's nothing that I or Apple Computer (AAPL) can do or say to change his mind. I went so far as to give him an iPod nano. He gave it to his girlfriend. So much for proselytizing.

After five years of pummeling us with the iPod and its associated iTunes music service and some 3,000 accessories, Apple is poised to face what some might say is its first real challenger. And that challenger is Microsoft's digital music player, Zune, which is poised to hit the market on Nov. 14 with the express intent of encroaching on Apple's turf.
You Can't Discount Microsoft

I can't fault Microsoft (MSFT) for envying Apple's success. (And it's not exactly the first time that Microsoft has looked on enviously at something that Apple does.) Even for Microsoft, which took in $44.6 billion in revenue in the most recent fiscal year, a product that brings in $7.6 billion in sales a year is nothing to sneeze at. Over five years, Apple has sold nearly 70 million iPods worth nearly $14 billion—all that at gross margin estimated to be at or near 50%.

So does the Zune have a chance? I've learned over time it's not wise to discount Microsoft. I thought little of the Xbox game console only to watch it grow in popularity and spawn the Xbox 360, which is also doing well. With the consoles, Microsoft proved its willingness to take a financial loss over time to establish a market beachhead (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/22/05, "Microsoft's Red Ink Game"), which is something Apple doesn't traditionally do—and certainly couldn't afford to do when the iPod launched.

The financial dynamics for the Zune are inherently different. Microsoft can't realistically sell a $249 Zune at a loss and expect to recoup losses on music sales. As successful as iTunes is in helping Apple sell iPods, it's not that impressive when you compare the music service to sales of the hardware. Yes, Apple has sold 1.5 billion songs since the launch of the iTunes store in spring 2003—but that averages only 22 songs per iPod sold during the same period.
Wi-Fi Sets Zune Apart

I haven't played with a Zune yet (though I intend to). But so far, the device doesn't have much to offer compared with the iPod. It will come in only one storage capacity, and that isn't all that high, especially when you consider that it's intended to play a mix of music and video. The Zune won't have all that many accessories, won't integrate with any cars, and doesn't support any language other than English.

So what does Zune offer the potential iPod-hater beyond the fact that it's not an iPod? For one, there's wireless connectivity. Zune users will be able to share songs directly from one device to the other, and maybe down the road, there are some other scenarios that might make Wi-Fi access worthwhile, like streaming audio from the Internet (which can already be done with some wireless phones).

But how many times a day do you really feel like sharing a song that's playing on your personal player with someone else? It's almost more efficient, and more permanent given the "3-play 3-day" limitations on playing shared songs I've been hearing about, to burn a CD and give that to your friend.
Apple Customers' Loyalty in Doubt

In many ways it will be the same. The Zune will be tied to a single music store, the Zune Marketplace, and will be cutting RealNetworks' (RNWK) Rhapsody, Napster (NAPS), and others out of its little ecosystem, just at a time when it's increasingly clear to me that for the digital music market to grow, closed ecosystems like this will have to move toward interoperability (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/25/06, "Apple, Tear Down This Wall").

While Mac owners tend to be iPod owners too, and there's a good deal of evidence that owning an iPod tends to encourage switching away from Windows and to the Mac (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/15/06, "Apple's Growing Bite of the Market "), there's at least some evidence that consumers who own iPods don't necessarily bear terribly strong loyalties toward the product over the long term.

ABI Research recently found that of 1,725 adults surveyed, 58% of those who already own an iPod said they'd consider buying a Zune in the next 12 months, after hearing about its features. Mind you, people don't always behave in real life the way they say they will in surveys.
For the Curious and the Haters

Additionally, I have problems with the methodology of the survey. I asked ABI analyst Steve Wilson if the results accounted for Mac users vs. Windows users. He said respondents were asked what kind of computer they used, but that the results were more or less equally distributed among them. But it's hard for me to imagine a self-aware Mac user who would consider a Zune as more or less equal to an iPod, mainly because the Zune won't work with a Mac. Still, I think the research suggests there's a market opening for Microsoft to exploit, but I'd argue that it's nowhere near as high as Wilson suggests.

There are some iPod owners—some frustrated, some simply curious, but all ready to try something different—who will try the Zune. And then there are the iPod-haters, like my friend mentioned above. For them, the best thing the Zune has to offer a potential consumer is that it doesn't bear the iPod name or the Apple logo.

And yet the iPod remains the hugely successful product, outshining its nearest competitors, such as Sandisk (SNDK), Creative, Samsung, Cowon, and others. And here is the reason I think the Zune will remain at a huge disadvantage: the cool factor.
Violating the Rules of Cool

Remember the three rules of cool, as documented by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker almost a decade ago. First: The act of discovering cool causes cool to move on. If you accept that the iPod is still cool, as many still do, then the Zune can't help but seem an arriviste, an interloper, poseur product encroaching on well-defined "cool" territory. When the uncool discover a cool place, the cool take their business elsewhere. Microsoft's a little light on the cool bona fides, despite the Xbox 360.

The Zune will seem a not-pod, proving the second rule of cool: It cannot be manufactured, only observed, and then by those who are themselves cool. An iPod is a requisite accoutrement of cool. This is the result of a carefully constructed marketing effort on Apple's part. Any attempt that Microsoft makes to market the Zune will fall short of the high bar set by Apple, which has an almost natural sense for turning its ads into entertainment. Describe for me three Apple TV ads you remember from the last two years. Now, try to describe for me three Microsoft ads. Bet you can't. That's the Apple marketing machine at work.

Finally, there's the third rule of cool: You have to be cool to know cool. And since when is Microsoft cool? The iPod was cool from birth. The Zune will be seen for what it is: a me-too product that is expressing Microsoft's envy at not being cool. It will carve out its own niche of the market, but by this time next year, it will be considered a dismal failure.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/t...d=1&adxnnlx=1163179697-XsmUj1sRLhHtgJtPiJdo9Q

November 9, 2006
State of the Art
Trying Out the Zune: IPod It’s Not
By DAVID POGUE

Microsoft is probably the greenest company in all of high tech. Not green in the environmental sense — green with envy.

Microsoft is so jealous of the iPod’s success that Tuesday it will unveil a new music system — pocket player, jukebox software and online music store — that’s an unabashed copy of Apple’s. It’s called Zune.

The amazing part is that it’s Microsoft’s second attempt to kill the iPod. The first was PlaysForSure — a gigantic multiyear operation involving dozens of manufacturers and online music stores. Microsoft went with its trusted Windows strategy: If you code it, the hardware makers will come (and pay licensing fees).

And sure enough, companies like Dell, Samsung and Creative made the players; companies like Yahoo, Rhapsody, Napster and MTV built the music stores.

But PlaysForSure bombed. All of them put together stole only market-share crumbs from Apple. The interaction among player, software and store was balky and complex — something of a drawback when the system is called PlaysForSure.

“Yahoo might change the address of its D.R.M. server, and we can’t control that,” said Scott Erickson, a Zune product manager. (Never mind what a D.R.M. server is; the point is that Microsoft blames its partners for the technical glitches.)

Is Microsoft admitting, then, that PlaysForSure was a dud? All Mr. Erickson will say is, “PlaysForSure works for some people, but it’s not as easy as the Zune.”

So now Microsoft is starting over. Never mind all the poor slobs who bought big PlaysForSure music collections. Never mind the PlaysForSure companies who now find themselves competing with their former leader. Their reward for buying into Microsoft’s original vision? A great big “So long, suckas!”

It was bad enough when there were two incompatible copy-protection standards: iTunes and PlaysForSure. Now there will be three.

(Although Microsoft is shutting its own PlaysForSure music store next week, it insists that the PlaysForSure program itself will live on.)

Microsoft’s proprietary closed system abandons one potential audience: those who would have chosen an iPod competitor just to show their resentment for Apple’s proprietary closed system.

To make matters worse, you can’t use Windows Media Player to load the Zune with music; you have to install a similar but less powerful Windows program just for the Zune. It’s a ridiculous duplication of effort by Microsoft, and a double learning curve for you.

So how is the Zune? It had better be pretty incredible to justify all of this hassle.

As it turns out, the player is excellent. It can’t touch the iPod’s looks or coolness, but it’s certainly more practical. It’s coated in slightly rubberized plastic, available in white, black or brown — yes, brown. It won’t turn heads, but it won’t get fingerprinty and scratched, either. It sounds just as good as the iPod.

The Zune matches the price ($250) and capacity of the 30-gigabyte iPod. But it’s noticeably thicker (0.6 inch vs. 0.4), taller (4.4 inches vs. 4.1) and heavier (5.6 ounces vs. 4.8). Battery life is the same for music playback (14 hours), slightly better for video (4 hours vs. 3.5). The three-inch screen has the same 320-by-240-pixel resolution, but it’s larger (3 inches vs. 2.5), so movies and slide shows feel more expansive.

What looks like an iPod scroll wheel, though, is a fakeout. It doesn’t turn, and it’s not touch-sensitive. Instead, it’s just four buttons hidden under the compass points of a plastic ring.

Scrolling accelerates as you press the top or bottom button, but the iPod’s wheel is much more efficient. On the other hand, the Zune’s left and right buttons jump between menus (for example, Album, Artist, Genre) with less backtracking. The software design is beautiful, simple and graced by brief, classy animations.

The Zune’s screen is taller than it is wide — unlike the iPod’s — so you can see more of your lists without scrolling. But it’s all wrong for photos and videos. So when videos or photos play, the screen image rotates, meaning you have to turn the player 90 degrees. And just as on the iPod, portrait-oriented photos are now shrunken, crammed the wrong way on the horizontal screen.

The Zune has a built-in FM radio receiver, and even shows the name of the current song, if the station broadcasts it. Reception is fairly weak, the headphones must be plugged in to serve as an antenna, and you can’t make recordings.

The big, whomping Zune news, though, is wireless sharing. The Zune has a built-in Wi-Fi antenna. (Turning it on costs you one hour of battery life.)

During the playback of any photo or song, you can view a list of Zunes within 30 feet. Sending a song takes about 15 seconds, a photo 2 seconds; you can’t send videos at all.

Your lucky recipient can accept or decline your offering — and, if you have really terrible taste, can block your Zune permanently.

It all works well enough, but it’s just so weird that Zunes can connect only to each other. Who’d build a Wi-Fi device that can’t connect to a wireless network — to sync with your PC, for example? Nor to an Internet hot spot, to download music directly?

Microsoft also faces what’s known as the Dilemma of the First Guy With a Telephone: Who you gonna call? The Zune will have to rack up some truly amazing sales before it’s easy to find sharing partners.

Microsoft is leaving nothing to chance here. The Zune will be available in 30,000 stores nationwide — versus 10,000 for the iPod, Microsoft says. Zune commercials will run several times during each episode of popular TV shows, bearing the slogan “Welcome to the social.” (Either there’s a noun missing there, or they’re using “social” as a noun, as in “ice cream social.”)

The bigger problem, though, is the draconian copy protection on beamed music (though not photos). You can play a transmitted song only three times, all within three days. After that, it expires. You’re left with only a text tag that shows up on your PC so that — how convenient! — you can buy the song from Microsoft’s store.

This copy protection is as strict as a 19th-century schoolmarm. Just playing half the song (or one minute, whichever comes first) counts as one “play.” You can never resend a song to the same friend. A beamed song can’t be passed along to a third person, either.

What’s really nuts is that the restrictions even stomp on your own musical creations. Microsoft’s literature suggests that if you have a struggling rock band, you could “put your demo recordings on your Zune” and “when you’re out in public, you can send the songs to your friends.” What it doesn’t say: “And then three days later, just when buzz about your band is beginning to build, your songs disappear from everyone’s Zunes, making you look like an idiot.”

Microsoft says that the wireless sharing is a new way to discover music. But you can’t shake the feeling that it’s all just a big plug for Microsoft’s music store. If it’s truly about the joy of music discovery, why doesn’t Microsoft let you buy your discoveries from any of the PlaysForSure stores?

The Zune offers some niceties you can’t get on the iPod. For example, any photo can be the menu background. Album artwork automatically fills the entire screen during playback. You can “flag” any song or photo for future reference on your PC. You can plug the Zune into an Xbox 360 and use its controller to play what’s on your Zune through your entertainment system.

But the opposite list — features the iPod has that the Zune doesn’t — could stretch to Steve Ballmer’s house and back 10 times.

At the very attractive but dog-slow Zune store, for example, you can either buy songs ($1 each) or rent them (unlimited songs for $15 a month). But Microsoft’s store doesn’t sell TV shows, movies or audio books. The music catalog is much smaller — 2 million vs. 3.5 million on iTunes — a fact that Microsoft ham-handedly tries to conceal by listing stuff that it doesn’t actually sell, like Beatles albums.

The Zune store is also missing gift certificates, allowances, user-submitted playlists and so on. And believe it or not, the Zune store doesn’t let you subscribe or download podcasts. (Maybe Microsoft just couldn’t bring itself to type the word “pod.”)

The Zune 1.0 player is pretty barren, too. It doesn’t have a single standard iPod amenity: no games, alarm clock, stopwatch, world clock, password-protected volume limiter, equalizer, calendar, address book or notes module.

Incredibly, you can’t even use the Zune as an external hard drive, as you can with just about every other player on earth — an extremely handy option for carting around big computer files.

Naturally, you also miss out on the 3,000 iPod accessories: speaker systems, microphones, cases, home and auto adapters, remote controls and so on. Over 80 percent of 2007 cars will have an iPod connector option — zero for Zune. And there’s only one Zune model; there’s no equivalent of the iPod Nano or Shuffle.

Competition is good and all. But what, exactly, is the point of the Zune? It seems like an awful lot of duplication — in a bigger, heavier form with fewer features — just to indulge Microsoft’s “we want some o’ that” envy. Wireless sharing is the one big new idea — and if the public seems to respond, Apple could always add that to the iPod.

Then again, this is all standard Microsoft procedure. Version 1.0 of Microsoft Anything is stripped-down and derivative, but it’s followed by several years of slow but relentless refinement and marketing. Already, Microsoft says that new Zune features, models and accessories are in the pipeline.

For now, though, this game is for watching, not playing. It may be quite a while before brown is the new white.
 
Tetragrammaton said:
Apple is actually awesome :dry:
No Apple sucks. The ipod is a black hole of suckage. There are tonnes of better players but people swallow Apples hype and by a crap product.
 
I'm interested, but I don't like the fact that it can't link up to wifi hotspots. That's my ONLY problem.
 
lars573 said:
No Apple sucks. The ipod is a black hole of suckage. There are tonnes of better players but people swallow Apples hype and by a crap product.
But no one takes your opinion seriously, you think NG sucks :o
 
Lars has terrible opinions, but he is right about iPods being a bandwagon of bad technology.
 
I certainly don't hate apple. In fact, I have an ibook for my school computer, but I absolutely hate ipods. I don't think they're well made pieces of equipment.
 
WhatsHisFace said:
iPods are a bandwagon of bad technology and a shining symbol of Apple's jackassful self-exclusivity. Battery life of two years... kiss my ass.

Indeed. My sister has gone through 3 iPods (1 original, 2 video) and I'm still on my first Creative.
 
GoldenAgeHero said:
your in for an eye opener with the zune.

Noone said I was buying the Zune did they? In fact, earlier I said I was interested, but the fact that it wasn't hot spot compatible was a complete turn off for me.
 

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