Details of Next Gen Zune Surface 308
KMG writes "Zune Scene has got a scoop about the next generation Microsoft Zune. There will be two new models; a flash memory based and a hard drive based. Zune with HDD will be thinner and have larger storage capacity while the flash based will feature Wi-fi, video playback. So will we see another try from Microsoft to beat Apple's iPod or it will be another vain attempt from the Redmond guys."
More the Merrier (Score:5, Insightful)
Bring it on I say. MS has shown that they can learn from their mistakes. The difference between the Xbox and 360 being a prime example. MS has the money to burn to keep making mistakes and learning from them. If that means they *eventually* make an iPod killer, so be it. The market needs more competing products, not less.
Why should it beat the ipod? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Is it worth it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Great move for both iPod users and other users (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More the Merrier (Score:3, Insightful)
a) Buy out the competition
b) Copy the competition
c) Throw more money at the mistake and wait until next-gen to re-try A and B
Will it reduce iPod prices (Score:2, Insightful)
Look. (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because you don't put a question mark at the end of your badly phrased attempt to stir up the flames doesn't mean it's any less of an annoying and pointless question.
PLEASE stop with the inane, pointless, content-free rhetorical questions at the end of submissions. They're annoying, biased, and make Slashdot look like amateur hour. The conversations would flow just as well, if not better, without the obvious "here's what you should think about this story" cues. Too bad the editors keep falling for them.
Re:No, DRM Lock-In (Score:2, Insightful)
Scene from a store on Zune Sharing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Customer: That sounds cool.
Me: But you can only play the shared song 3 times and it deletes itself after 3 days.
Customer: Thats lame and pointless then.
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The lads I play poker with on a Monday night who are not technical are, in the main, the target audience and for them bigger is better. Their phones have to have the latest gadgets and they can tell you the number of pixels in their cameras without having to think about it, despite the fact that I pretty sure none of them would know a pixel if they met one in the street. I'm in a desparate battle to stop them all upgrading to Vista 'because it's new'
It all really dates back to the playground and a 'my mp3 player has more storage than your mp3 player' attitude. That's what the purchasing public wants.
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:2, Insightful)
If I didn't want the spontaneity of being able to instantly pull up and play Cream's albums, followed by mid-career Madonna, then Korn, then Tangerine Dream, some Isaac Hayes, some classic Who, then Enya's latest, I wouldn't even buy music, I'd just listen to the radio.
I buy music to have convenient, rapid access to what I want to hear. I don't buy music to have it sit on some distant shelf; if that was the utility of it, there's a library just down the street with a fairly good collection.
Why shouldn't I want a copy of my whole collection in my pocket? At least I'm realistic enough to know that given the size of my collection, it's not going to happen soon, though.
Re:Xbox 360 is a flop (Score:3, Insightful)
360 is still has, by leaps and bounds, a far larger installed base than any of the other next-gen consoles. Discounting the Wii (which services a different market entirely), the 360 is selling like hotcakes in comparison to the other major competing next-gen console.
Smartphones are far from flops. Blackberry's market share is being eaten away ever so steadily by Win-Mobile devices. It's not an avalanche victory, but it is going well for MS nonetheless.
For MS's failures, they are getting quite a few things right. And this is coming from me, a die-hard Apple user.
Re:"Zune Scene"? (Score:4, Insightful)
I especially like how the article claims the Zune scene editor just happened to conveniently bump into a MS Zune employee on a business trip and then proceeded to pump him for information...
Yeah, right. And then monkeys flew out of his butt.
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason is that with a larger collection, lets say 12,000 songs, who wants to spend the time to pick which 8,000 song to sync to the device?????
And when I want to hear something, I want to hear it!
So, I will not buy an MP3 player that doesn't hold my entire collection of music. I also want TV shows and movies. Eventually I plan to put every movie and TV show I own on DVD onto my computer and sync it to my iPod.
I like hard drives. I'm not a child - I can carry around an iPod without dropping it.
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:2, Insightful)
By happy coincidence, there are also companies that want your money, and sell devices that suit your needs. Your purchasing decisions are not subject to my value judgements.
See how this works?
Re:More the Merrier (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple was smart to slowly and systematically bring out new capabilities without making existing functionality more complex... this drove a repurchase tread that feed unit volumes and hype which allowed the iPod and Apple to capture mindshare.
It is mindshare that makes the iPod truly successful and not any integration with iTunes Music Store.
Re:More the Merrier (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not a fair statement to make. While MS has done their fair share of "embrace, extend, extinguish", what we've seen traditionally with MS's hardware divisions is anything but that.
Xbox: Single-handedly invents modern multiplay on the console. Still the leading online service that is leading in every way to the competing PS3 and Wii. There was no service for MS to copy from, and much of what they did is now being copied by Sony and Nintendo!
Even Zune 1.0 had innovative features that were anything but copying, albeit the execution was terribly flawed. I was very excited about the Zune - sending songs to your friends over WiFi, buying via WiFi, synching via WiFi... All that good stuff that, for some bone-headed reason was either terribly restrictive or simply didn't make it in. This is also why I'm rooting for the Zune 2.0 - there is so much potential there to make something that'd replace my current iPod.
In the end the consumers win. If MS manages to make something that can stand up to the iPod, great, more choice for me as a consumer.
Re:Yes, Apple's got you by the short-and-curlies (Score:1, Insightful)
If you buy from iTMS, you have DRM on those files. If you just rip something with iTunes it will not have DRM.
How this FUD keeps getting modded up is beyond me.
Too early (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess my dislike of the Zune wifi features were too early and/or poorly implemented. I'm not going to discuss the details of the shortcomings of the Zune's Wi-Fi feature. Some people may credit them with being the first to offer wi-fi of any sort but did anyone ever think about why no other manufacturer implemented it first? (Apple, Creative, Sandisk, etc) The reason being was that wireless would be (and still is) impratical.
Sure it would be cool to send songs wirelessly but that is only pratical for a few songs. You cannot transfer whole collections (measure in GBs) in a reasonable amount of time given the current state of wireless technology. 802.11g has a max rate of 54Mbps. 802.11n (540Mbps max) is the only version that can handle the rates required but wasn't in draft status until recently and won't be ratified until 2008. While USB2.0 has 480MBps and Fire400 has 400Mbps now. So if you were a manufacturer comtemplating wireless wouldn't you wait until 802.11n was more mature before implementing wireless?
Even if wireless had the transfer rates required today, there are issues with battery life and security. I have a large collection and it took over 20 minutes to put into my iPod using USB2.0. Transferring all that data wireless is going to drain the batteries quickly. And then there is security. I can see a lot of ramifications with using wireless transfers. Eventually these can be overcome but it will take time. I think MS was a bit too early. Just my 2cents.
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Still it is interesting to think that it would take that long to listen to that much music sequentially. I have a portable XM player that can record 5 hours of content. It seemed like a lot when I got it, but it is funny how quickly you start to feel like you wish you had more space.
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Take the long view: this stuff piles up after months and years, it's not like most people just suddenly had 80 GB of music out of nowhere!
Re:More the Merrier (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Xbox 360 is a flop (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as you don't include its toughest competition, the XBOX 360 is doing batshit-awesome !
iPhone and no Exchange integration (Score:2, Insightful)
This feature may be in the works in the future, just like I'm pretty sure Cingular won't be the only provider in the long run. But I feel that this is the main thing holding it back.
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flash seems to be the way to go.... (Score:3, Insightful)
You then add this spin, whereby you somehow suggest that your "50 hours a week" of listening at/to/from work might only be around 2 weeks. You don't actually say it, though, because it looks far better for your so-called "point" to use the figure of two weeks, when even at your 50 hours a week, said collection would take 13 MONTHS to listen to.
Let's consider this 3100 hour album collection, too. Give or take, an hour an album is a good bet. Some electronica (and others, but less so) fills the 74 minute CD. Plenty of other albums are 45 minutes, or less, so I think this isn't bad. So, we're looking at 3,100 albums. Not a bad effort. Let's say $12 a CD. That's fair, I think. Many albums go for $14-20. Some are discounts, $5-10.
Not a bad little music collection there, all thirty-seven thousand dollars worth of it.
I have no doubt many people have a music collection of this size. I have little doubt that many people who do haven't acquired it all legitimately. Some certainly have.
3100 albums requires a lot of shelf space, too. 105 ft of it, in fact. No small task. And that's before we even consider records.
Speaking of assholes:
The fuck are you talking about? The guy you labeled as "ASSHOLE OF THE YEAR" was specifically responding to:
But hey, let's not minor details like that stop your rant proceeding full throttle, huh?
Re:"Zune Scene"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, really lame. If I want official info, I'd like it without the horrid writing.
Re:Great move for both iPod users and other users (Score:2, Insightful)
That said, competition is very good for all of us. But it's best when competitors have products that continually out do each other. Once we actually do have an iPod killer, then we'll actually get to see some very unique products as they duel for 1st place.