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iPod Zune rave reviews - Now 'Best mp3 player'

Sesshi said:
Yes, and I always like to jam a spoke into the wheel of brain-dead Apple worship. I like the iPod as much as anyone else - heck, it was a game-changing device for me coming from Minidisc - but the clear functional superiority it had is over as a music platform. It's taken way too long, but a few other players are beginning to get their heads around this business, finally.
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You don't have to be a brain-dead Apple loyalist to see that the iPod still leads the way in portable music. Sure, MS have done great with this new version of the Zune and hopefully they'll keep trying (it's always good to have choice), but the range of iPods that exist today are still better than anything else at the same price point IMHO.

David
 
davidjearly said:
You don't have to be a brain-dead Apple loyalist to see that the iPod still leads the way in portable music. Sure, MS have done great with this new version of the Zune and hopefully they'll keep trying (it's always good to have choice), but the range of iPods that exist today are still better than anything else at the same price point IMHO.

David
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As I obliquely pointed out, I think you didn't have to be a brain-dead Apple loyalist to see that the iPod still leads the way in portable music - until about one or two years ago.

It's the most populist choice for the higher-end MP3 player market because it's simple to use, has a recognisable look, you don't have to think about it and it does what most people want. But this is like saying a BMW 5-series is the best car on the market today. Populist does not automatically mean 'best'. For that money for example, you could buy lots of other things depending on what you want.
 
Sesshi said:
As I obliquely pointed out, I think you didn't have to be a brain-dead Apple loyalist to see that the iPod still leads the way in portable music - until about one or two years ago.

It's the most populist choice for the higher-end MP3 player market because it's simple to use, has a recognisable look, you don't have to think about it and it does what most people want. But this is like saying a BMW 5-series is the best car on the market today. Populist does not automatically mean 'best'. For that money for example, you could buy lots of other things depending on what you want.
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I think you're getting confused. 'Still', in this regard means 'presently', i.e. today. You can't suggest that the iPod leads the way still if you mean only up until one or two years ago.

In the end it is a matter of opinion, hence 'IMHO' at the end of my last post. I do think that other manufacturers are finally catching up, but they still have a long way to go in terms of actually doing something radical - the way the iPod did a few years ago.

The new Zunes are a perfect example of an old Apple design reinvented. This does not make it a bad portable a/v player, but nor does it make it better than the current iPods.
 
Care to offer any reasons for iPod still being the unquestionable number one? I agree about the innovative interface Apple first made and stuff, but when you're buying a product, you take a look at how things are standing at that moment. It's like saying the mp3 player of the company that made the first mp3 player is somehow better because of this fact.

Currently, iPod's advantages are slightly smaller dimensions (couple milimeters here and there) and a slightly better battery life (both ipod and zune have 30h declared, but ipod gets more than that and the zune gets less). Another arguable advantage is the whole iTunes experience, but apart from that I don't see any major things.

Zune, on the other hand, has a much bigger screen & wireless syncing and song sharing capabilities.

Other things are very similar on both sides (good earphones, capacity, touch controls, ...) which IMHO makes them pretty equal, wouldn't you say? What is that special thing on the iPod that makes it the undisputable leader of the market?
 
Sesshi said:
As I obliquely pointed out, I think you didn't have to be a brain-dead Apple loyalist to see that the iPod still leads the way in portable music - until about one or two years ago.
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When the 3G iPod was out you could claim that some of the Creative players were better, I know many people who got 30GB Creatives for £150, and to be honest they had more features than the iPod and were fairly small, and the software, while not quite as good as Apple's wasn't too bad, especially for the price.

The new Zune looks OK, it has the advantage that it supports FM Radio out the box (I personally don't care, but...) and supports subscription music (again if you care), but has less accessories, is less cool, and MS are more likely to stop your device being supported in the future (they killed Plays4Sure). But it has no EQ, which is a nice feature of the iPod.

Of course the iPod Touch is a really nice MP3 Player, and come February it'll hopefully be a nice PDA too ;). The Zune (80GB) is only really better if you have a large music library and are attached to carrying round more than a subset.

The other features are mostly even more irrelevant. The WiFi syncing is only good if you have your music stored on a central server which is fairly inaccessible which is only an issue to a tiny minority of users.

However if you do have a central media server assuming the Zune has a decent UI.
 
illicium said:
"The bad: The Zune is a PC-only device that requires its own software and still does not support older WMA-DRM9 music files."
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I've got some bad news for you - Intel based Macs ARE -wait for it - PC's and you CAN run Windows on it. Uh-oh, looks like the new Zune can be used with Macs. Maybe Apple needs to back up on their advertising that the new Macs are like owning two computers otherwise more people might by the Zune.:eek:

Yeah, that is messed up about older WMV formats not being supported though, but as you said, who uses that anyways.


illicium said:
it can be legitimately said that Macs and other Apple products are the MOST universal products out there. (minus the small fact that ipods won't support Windows Media Formats, but who uses those anyways ;))
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And minus the fact that you can only install it's OS on an Apple marked machine...:rolleyes:

The new Zune looks good and definitely is a huge improvement over the first gen. I'd consider buying it once my ipod dies - maybe by then they will have an all new one that has no cons - such as not being able to sync on the go.
 
I've got some bad news for you - Intel based Macs ARE -wait for it - PC's and you CAN run Windows on it. Uh-oh, looks like the new Zune can be used with Macs. Maybe Apple needs to back up on their advertising that the new Macs are like owning two computers otherwise more people might by the Zune.
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Err, killerrobot, I have to disagree. Although I have been defending the Zune in this topic, I think you're wrong. Mac support actually means Mac OS X support. The option to boot into Windows may be useful to do some specific tasks, but syncing your Zune isn't one of them. Listening to music, sorting it out, buying new stuff, burning CDs and similar things are all stuff you should do from your primary OS. You listen to music while you do work/school assignments, while you surf the web, etc, so your library has to be accessible most of the time, which means you have to use OS X software to manage it. If you are an OS X user, you can't afford to boot into windows every time you want to sync your library. That's supposed to be a quick process, a matter of plugging your player in and perhaps clicking a couple of times.

And minus the fact that you can only install it's OS on an Apple marked machine...
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That's a part of the package. OS X isn't magic, it's as good as it is because it is made for a limited number of machines. If it worked on every PC out there, like Windows do, it would face similar security/stability problems.
 
stevehp said:
meh.

We all know what's best.
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Exactly.

illicium said:
"The bad: The Zune is a PC-only device that requires its own software and still does not support older WMA-DRM9 music files."



Wait a min here. Did I read this right? The Zune can't even support all of Microsoft's audio formats?? And PC-only???? I'm becoming more and more astounded at how people still think that Apple products are very incompatible with the rest of the world, but every day i see more and more proof that not only is this not true, but since iTunes for windows, boot camp and parallels, and Pages being able to open .docx formats while Office 2004 for Mac can't etc., it can be legitimately said that Macs and other Apple products are the MOST universal products out there. (minus the small fact that ipods won't support Windows Media Formats, but who uses those anyways ;))
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Yea you read it right, and how a PC only device which doesn't even support all Windows Media files got a better review than the classic is beyond me. Oh Apple has been ripped a new one for years because the only pay service the iPod works with is iTunes, while the fact that songs bought 4 seconds or 4 years ago will work with the iPod gets no praise.
 
I think the iPod Classic is still a viable competitor for the Zune...it supports MP3 and AAC, for starters. And it's compatible with both PC and Macs. With that said, the Zune has improved.

The iPod Touch, on the other hand, is superior IMO. 8-16GB is currently enough to hold most people's entire libraries, so the extra space isn't as critical as some believe.
 
illicium said:
"The bad: The Zune is a PC-only device that requires its own software and still does not support older WMA-DRM9 music files."



Wait a min here. Did I read this right? The Zune can't even support all of Microsoft's audio formats?? And PC-only???? I'm becoming more and more astounded at how people still think that Apple products are very incompatible with the rest of the world, but every day i see more and more proof that not only is this not true, but since iTunes for windows, boot camp and parallels, and Pages being able to open .docx formats while Office 2004 for Mac can't etc., it can be legitimately said that Macs and other Apple products are the MOST universal products out there. (minus the small fact that ipods won't support Windows Media Formats, but who uses those anyways ;))
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Actually iPod DOES support Windows Media Formats through iTunes (iTunes can translate unprotected WMF files into formats iPod can play).

=)
 
Matek said:
Err, killerrobot, I have to disagree. Although I have been defending the Zune in this topic, I think you're wrong. Mac support actually means Mac OS X support. The option to boot into Windows may be useful to do some specific tasks, but syncing your Zune isn't one of them. Listening to music, sorting it out, buying new stuff, burning CDs and similar things are all stuff you should do from your primary OS. You listen to music while you do work/school assignments, while you surf the web, etc, so your library has to be accessible most of the time, which means you have to use OS X software to manage it. If you are an OS X user, you can't afford to boot into windows every time you want to sync your library. That's supposed to be a quick process, a matter of plugging your player in and perhaps clicking a couple of times.
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Sorry for playing too much of a devil's advocate. I do know it means OSX support but with so many people also running windows on their machine, you have to ask yourself which one is the primary OS? I personally wouldn't have a problem just syncing up my Zune every once in a while on my Mac through Windows...now if installing Windows could just get somehow as easy and cheap as installing iTunes (yeah, I know that's highly likely);)
 
Just throwing this into the mix, but you guys do realize that the Zune can play unprotected AAC tracks without any problems whatsoever, correct?
 
Zune still won't do gapless playback, which OK took Apple long enough, but I would not want to go back to a player which did not do this. Does it have disk mode?
 
I don't see what's the fuss over syncing over Wi-Fi. It takes about 10 seconds to transfer a song over Wi-Fi. It takes, what, one second over a wired connection? Plug in a wire, sync really fast, unplug, and leave with a slight increase in battery charge, or turn on Wi-Fi, get the computer and the Zune to connect, wait for songs to sync, and then leave with the battery charged reduced quite a bit? I'll take the former, thanks. Have we become so lazy that we can't plug/unplug a cable to sync our DAPs (at a faster speed, nontheless). Useless Wi-Fi features aside, does the Zune offer anything major that the iPod doesn't? Not really. An the iPod has better battery life. I really don't see how the Zune is superior.

That said, AAC actually isn't proprietary like the way WMA is. It's just that Apple choose to adopt AAC for iTunes instead of MP3s, and the prominence of iTunes made AAC associated with Apple as opposed to the actual original developers of the format.
 
It was acceptable in the 80's

I used to quite like my Sony Walkman (in the 80's)- you knew where you were with a Walkman.

You could pretend you knew stuff about science and recording techniques by switching the 'chrome' function on, or activating 'Dolby NR'.
You could wow your mates by having it 'auto-search' the next track (fast forward).
You could put any tape you liked inside it, it usually didn't eat them.
You could get a large collection of them together and actually arrange them into a small house.

Mine broke eventually, so I bought a smaller Panasonic version.

Nobody hated me for it. :apple:
 
I don't see what's the fuss over syncing over Wi-Fi. It takes about 10 seconds to transfer a song over Wi-Fi. It takes, what, one second over a wired connection? Plug in a wire, sync really fast, unplug, and leave with a slight increase in battery charge, or turn on Wi-Fi, get the computer and the Zune to connect, wait for songs to sync, and then leave with the battery charged reduced quite a bit? I'll take the former, thanks. Have we become so lazy that we can't plug/unplug a cable to sync our DAPs (at a faster speed, nontheless). Useless Wi-Fi features aside, does the Zune offer anything major that the iPod doesn't? Not really. An the iPod has better battery life. I really don't see how the Zune is superior.
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I have a new 500 GB external 3.5" drive. On USB, can reach transfer speeds up to 25 MB/s. So lets say the tiny drive in the iPod/Zune can achieve about 15 MB/s. Zune supports the 54 Mbps Wi-Fi g standard, which has the max theoretical throughput of 6.75 MB/s, but lets lower that down to 5 MB/s (you can never reach the theoretical max values). That leaves the WiFi sync 3x slower, but still decently fast. I don't know where you got 10 seconds per song, because 5 MB/s is less than one second per song. So if you add a new album, the syncing time would be something like 20 s (wireless) vs 7 s (wired). I'd say both are very acceptable.

Regardles of the above, I don't like your if-the-competitor-has-a-feature-its-useless attitude. What you wrote here is something like saying that a laptop with wireless network support is no better than one without it. The transfer rates are miserable compared to gigabit ethernet and it also drains more battery. Have we become so lazy we can't plug a cable into our machine if we want to connect to the network? :p

I hope you see my point - nowadays it's all about convenience. The lower transfer speed and decreased battery life are both an acceptable tradeoff for being able to sync your DAP anywhere in the house.

Noone is saying that the Zune is far superior to the iPod, but I do think it's fair to consider it a valid competitor, it's not inferior either. Other pretty big features of Zune you are asking about could be a much bigger screen, an FM tuner and in-ear headphones.
 
No, I'm comparing the Zune 80 and the iPod classic (3.2 inch vs 2.5 inch screen). You were probably trying to point out that the Nano has a bigger screen than the Zune 4/Zune 8.

That's true, of course, but pretty irrelevant IMHO. I'd say screen size isn't that important in this class. The nano is, after all, much smaller and as such not intended for heavy video playback (its capacity proves that). And the difference is only 0.2".
 
Sesshi said:
It's the most populist choice for the higher-end MP3 player market because it's simple to use, has a recognisable look, you don't have to think about it and it does what most people want. But this is like saying a BMW 5-series is the best car on the market today.
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I really have no idea what you are trying to argue.
 
I myself have never used a Zune, but the single person I know that has one likes it, even more so than her iPod, however she also uses a Dell :p

I think the fact that users of the original Zune get the new firmware upgrade, does Apple do this? I dunno as I don't upgrade my iPod's software, but I'd love to have the same firmware on my 5G as is on the Classic.
 
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