Thursday, August 17, 2006

Zune Pics

Gizmodo has a picture of the upcoming Zune by Microsoft.  The Zune, said to be the iPod killer, looks fairly ugly to me.  There is not a lot of information on it, but as it comes available I'll have it posted.


More information was added at Gizmodo here, but the only thing that intrigues me is this:



FM support is fairly complete, with both an FM tuner and an FM transmitter so you can beam the music to your car. The FM transmitter also feeds up Song and Artist information so you can see what's playing from your car stereo (if it supports that feature, like in GM cars). Pretty neat.



While this is possible with an iPod, it's an add-on that you have to purchase separately.  I haven't done so yet, but I would like one for my car.  I'm sure Apple isn't far behind with their newest iPods being announced in December, and a handy feature like this would be nice to see.


Engadget also has information on the Zune, courtesy of iLounge, but really it says much of the same.  One feature that did stick out was listed here:



...but of course the Zune's killer app is WiFi. iLounge says that you'll be allowed to "loan" songs to other users for a day, which they can proceed to buy from the Zune music store, and you'll also be able to stream music to a WiFi-enabled Xbox 360, but we're not sure if a hard drive will be required to pull it off. At a purported $300 pricetag, we can't tell if the Zune will have what it takes to challenge the iPod -- iLounge, naturally, has their doubts -- but from the writeup it does seem like the Zune will have at least one heavily bandied feature: video.



'Loan' songs to friends?  Since everything digital is made of 1's and 0's this'll be cracked in no time.  You can 'loan' your song to your friend and they take it home, put it on their PC, crack it, put it back on the Zune, and away they go.  It'll only be a matter of time.  Look at the '360.  How long did it take people to crack the system?  No time at all.  How much effort did MS put into designing a system where people couldn't copy their friends games?  Too much for the amount of effort it took to crack their system.  Anyway, off topic a bit.


The technical details of the Zune will reveal whether or not it'll be worth switching over to iPod, or at the very least, going with both.


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2 comments:

Michael G said...

othing will kill the iPod till there is an iTunes for everthing.

and all jmusic can be transfered to any player or computer.

With out a hack

Jason said...

And MS will never do something like that. So maybe it's time that someone starts building something like that.

Is it a problem that each player has it's own way of connecting to the computer? I have used many, but the ones I have had won't let you use them like a HDD and need music to be transfered through a proprietary software system. I think it's possible, but it's beyond what I can program (without a year or two to study it).