Twas the night before Macworld when all through the town
No MacBook was mooing nor turning brown
At Moscone, nerds were queuing with care
in hopes that Saint Steve would soon be there.
Category: Portable Entertainment
Categories
How to beat the iPod
The Zen Vision W launched in the US today and I took a look at the specs on Creative’s website. Looks like a pretty cool product, but they’ve got some work in the marketing department. Maybe they figure this thing will market itself.
Apple has probably the best marketing team in the consumer electronics and computer world right now. Creative should consider taking a page out of their book to win in the marketplace. Below are a few examples how they might combat Apple’s marketing team.
#1. Make your product pages clear and concise.
A little bird sent me this page today:
When you click “Learn More” find out more, you are taken to this page:
Um, ok, whatever.
#2. Sell the benefit, not the specs.
Ok, so it looks like the Zen will hold 15,000 songs. Cool.
Except, maybe there was a misprint because one of them costs more than the other one and it has 60GBs instead of 30GBs of space.
Nope, they meant to put that there. Congrats, my mom just bought the cheaper one!
So, if you can’t accomplish the other 2, at least:
#3. Try not confuse users.
Creative seems to have sent their “B” marketing team on this product. How the hell are you expecting to beat the iPod if you can’t figure out how to sell your device. For a device named the Zen, the site and the product seem awfully difficult to use.
This post is a little mean spirited, but I want the Zen to be better. Competition is the thing that drives product development and gets us better products. Maybe the Zune will bring their “A” team to the table.
Microsoft Photosynth demo
Wow… I never say wow about Microsoft products (unless it’s wow, that’s lame or wow, have you heard of usability?). But this is a very cool 3d photo visualization tool. [via Addicted to Digital Media]
Jeff’s Quick Guide to TV on the Net
Get your fix here. Comprehensive guide to repurposed television shows on the net. [via PVRBlog]
Newton takes down Samsung UMPC
No love lost for the Newton, but a brand new piece of tech taken down by the old school handheld… gotta love it. [via Engadget]
Mergers, wikis and movies, oh my!
AMD buys ATI
Are any TLA companies starting with “A” safe from this insanity?
SocialText goes open source and JotSpot goes 2.0
Two wikis enter, one wiki leaves. Will the open source wonder take down its more usable, more expensive foe?
Amazon to offer movie downloads
Jobs better get their service out soon before everyone else does.
Categories
Thursday Links
CinemaNow gets more funding
$20mm should help… I thought bandwidth was free?
GUBA inks deal with Sony
These guys are on a roll.
Efax: How not to treat your customers
I had a free account cancelled for overuse. Apparently, their customer service isn’t so great, either. [via Daring Fireball]
Looking back at Hotwired
Hotwired rejoins Wired so what better time than now to look back it’s interesting history. [via Daring Fireball]
Here’s a an email a friend I’ll call ‘iPodFan’ sent me today regarding the Creative Zen. You might remember, I played with the Zen:M back at CES and wished it didn’t suck.
——–
My review of this review… and I’m completely unbiased!! 😉
Creative ZEN Vision:M Media Player
This is the same cost as the 30GB iPod with Video Playback. The ZEN Vision sells at Amazon for $299. The iPod 30GB is $289.99 at Amazon. 😉
My iPod’s hard drive kicked the bucket a mere week after its warranty ran out. Talk about rotten fruit. To get my life back in tune — and to spite Apple — I picked up this Creative media player.
Just like a cell phone, but with a delicate moving part, iPods have a useful lifetime… they won’t last forever. I’m sure Apple feels the spite, enjoy your Creative media player. Good luck getting it serviced if it develops problems.
In fact, upon further research, there are some interesting warranty features:
| Creative’s Warranty | Apple’s Warranty |
|---|---|
| warranty is not transferrable | transferrable warranty |
| warranty is only good in the country of purchase | worldwide warranty |
| labor costs are covered only for the first 3 months | labor costs are covered for the first 12 months |
| refurb models are only covered by a 30 day warranty | refurb models are covered by the same 1 year warranty |
| buyer pays repair shipping | pays shipping in the first 6 months |
Surprisingly, this stylish 30-Gbyte handheld held its own against my old iPod. It matches the video iPod’s MP3 and MPEG playback, makes up for lack of AAC support with DivX and Windows Media compatibility, and dazzles with its 2.5-inch LCD.
Same size screen, wonder how nice the Creative screen looks… I’ve never
seen one that was working on display.
(Editor’s Note – I’ve seen the screen, it was pretty nice.)
The menus and one of its buttons are customizable, and it has FM radio and a mike for recording messages. Plus, it mounted on my PC as a hard drive, so I could add files by just dragging and dropping — no more iTunes nightmares.
Windows Explorer for organizing your media… that sounds like loads of fun. FM radio: more fun. I am interested in the included Mike, is he cute? Does he take dictation? It’d be cool if they included a mic. (Sorry, pet peeve, Wired copy editors suck… I’ve seen so many typos lately.) My only iTunes nightmares are having to upgrade every ten minutes. 😉
My only complaint is that the vertical touchpad is a little too sensitive. And without iTunes Store compatibility, I have to get most of my video via BitTorrent. But that’s a small price to pay to escape Steve Jobs’ stranglehold on my music collection. — Erin Biba
Have fun getting sued. How does iTunes create a stranglehold? iTunes creates full quality Fraunhofer MP3 encodings at up to 320kbps, or VBR AAC, or even Apple Lossless (okay, that one is proprietary).
——
Thanks for the email, iPodfan! I love it when you’ve woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Keep ’em coming!
Need a little content for your iPod? Google has made its videos (not the ‘for pay’ videos, mind you) available for download reformatted for the PSP and iPod. Thank God, I can finally watch “Road Trip Prank,” “Shtanga,” “Indian Exotic Dance in Office 2” wherever I want!
Jonesing for your Swimsuit Edition in you pocket? Tomorrow morning, Apple is there to help you view SI‘s bathing beauties while on that commuter flight to Des Moines. $16 gets you all the videos for your iPod so you can look less creepy in coach oogling scantily clad young girls in your spare time.
(Via TUAW)
I thought when I launched this blog that I would have coverage of all things gadget, but I realized over time that there are certain product areas that I could care less about. Mobile phones actually tracks pretty high on that list. This isn’t to say I’ll never cover mobiles on the site, but they must be leaps, not steps above the rest.
It seems like mobile phone carriers launch a new middle of the road phone every other week and keeping up in the market is pretty difficult. That said, I do like to point my faithful reader(s) in the right direction. Engadget Mobile launched this morning and promises to cover the mobile phone world like nobody’s business.