ha ha lol, this what I thought mac rumors was all about lol, to hate Microsoft's products. So far, ive seen alot of Mac haters and PC fans, who spend there time insulting us, do we bother going onto PC forums and starting up rants with them, i certainly don't. They are just doing it, because all the PC nuts are worried that Apple will one day wipe them out.
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Zune HD Hands on Demo and Impressions
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ha ha lol, this what I thought mac rumors was all about lol, to hate Microsoft's products. So far, ive seen alot of Mac haters and PC fans, who spend there time insulting us, do we bother going onto PC forums and starting up rants with them, i certainly don't. They are just doing it, because all the PC nuts are worried that Apple will one day wipe them out.
Oh man, I thought you would have come back with a pic of some supermodel like the incredible Doutzen Kroes (sorry, I'm dutch and subjective, but she's just a realli great girl too..), just to tease us..
Who is Doutzen Kroes? This is..(Sorry for OT, but this benefits all, even world peace..)
Gizmodo Fanboyism...
I think it's possible this could be a good improvement of ZUNE if/when it ever comes out, but, lots of BS surrounding this device in my opinion...
Spare me the phony GIZMODO Microsoft fanboy video, please.
If this Zune were as good as they say & show it to be and so complete in design already, why is it not in production already? Why isn't it coming out next month?
Why are there no leaks as to who's manufacturing it and when?
Why pre-announce something that isn't coming out until "later this year"?
Didn't Microsoft use the term "later this year" with many products that came out a year or more later? (i.e.: well VISTA is a perfect example)
Apple only HAD to pre-announce the iPHONE because of the FCC spec regulations.
And once again, it's important to repeat... they only show the darn thing doing like 2-3 things. The iPHONE has the app store that enables it to do hundreds of things that this device will never in a million years be able to do most likely.
And furthermore, I'm still waiting for someone to explain the advantages of OLED. I'd read somewhere the screens don't even last very long. What's the advantage?
The more I watch this video over and over, the more I think, yeah, nice case, much better design, gee, it looks like my iPhone almost, but what else does it do again ???
Finally, has anyone mentioned that HD RADIO has been a complete flop nationwide?
Reception of HD-radio in cars has been a complete disaster too since stations have less than half their normal signal range in HD. And HD-Radio does not stand for hi-def either, this is a common misconception. Most peoples' AAC and mp3s sound better than HD-Radio. iBuiquity, of Columbia, Maryland, the creator of HD Radio might just be in bankruptcy before this device is ever released! LOL
FINAL PREDICTION: NOT DOA like the original Zune, they'll sell more, but just so many more people will be disappointed than with the original Zune and all thanks to Gizmodo for basically a phony false preview of what is basically the equivilent of vaporware at the moment. Thank you Gizmodo.
I think it's possible this could be a good improvement of ZUNE if/when it ever comes out, but, lots of BS surrounding this device in my opinion...
Spare me the phony GIZMODO Microsoft fanboy video, please.
If this Zune were as good as they say & show it to be and so complete in design already, why is it not in production already? Why isn't it coming out next month?
Why are there no leaks as to who's manufacturing it and when?
Why pre-announce something that isn't coming out until "later this year"?
Didn't Microsoft use the term "later this year" with many products that came out a year or more later? (i.e.: well VISTA is a perfect example)
Apple only HAD to pre-announce the iPHONE because of the FCC spec regulations.
And once again, it's important to repeat... they only show the darn thing doing like 2-3 things. The iPHONE has the app store that enables it to do hundreds of things that this device will never in a million years be able to do most likely.
And furthermore, I'm still waiting for someone to explain the advantages of OLED. I'd read somewhere the screens don't even last very long. What's the advantage?
The more I watch this video over and over, the more I think, yeah, nice case, much better design, gee, it looks like my iPhone almost, but what else does it do again ???
Finally, has anyone mentioned that HD RADIO has been a complete flop nationwide?
Reception of HD-radio in cars has been a complete disaster too since stations have less than half their normal signal range in HD. And HD-Radio does not stand for hi-def either, this is a common misconception. Most peoples' AAC and mp3s sound better than HD-Radio. iBuiquity, of Columbia, Maryland, the creator of HD Radio might just be in bankruptcy before this device is ever released! LOL
FINAL PREDICTION: NOT DOA like the original Zune, they'll sell more, but just so many more people will be disappointed than with the original Zune and all thanks to Gizmodo for basically a phony false preview of what is basically the equivilent of vaporware at the moment. Thank you Gizmodo.
Oh man, I thought you would have come back with a pic of some supermodel like the incredible Doutzen Kroes (sorry, I'm dutch and subjective, but she's just a realli great girl too..), just to tease us..
Who is Doutzen Kroes? This is..(Sorry for OT, but this benefits all, even world peace..)
ha ha well I was going to, but I'm on a really bad connection at the moment, lol
the advantage of Microsoft using OLED Technology in the Zune, is so they break quicker just out of warranty and then forcing the customer to buy another LOL, just like the Xbox 360
Oh man, I thought you would have come back with a pic of some supermodel like the incredible Doutzen Kroes (sorry, I'm dutch and subjective, but she's just a realli great girl too..), just to tease us..
Who is Doutzen Kroes? This is..(Sorry for OT, but this benefits all, even world peace..)
Dude, how did you get that picture of my future ex-wife?
From wiki:
A significant benefit of OLED displays over traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) is that OLEDs do not require a backlight to function. Thus they draw far less power and, when powered from a battery, can operate longer on the same charge. Because there is no need for a backlight, an OLED display can be much thinner than an LCD panel. Degradation of OLED materials has limited their use so far.
yeah, I'm guessing when the time is right, and the OLED technology is better, Apple will switch to it
It depends on whether you are talking white, red, blue or green OLEDs. White works for 100,000 hours, red has abt 65,000 hours while green has abt 75,000 hrs. It is the blue OLED that has abt 20,000 hrs lifetime. This is the problem and they are working on it.
Regarding cost of production, currently it is at around $1000/sq.m. They want to bring it to $200 sq.m. But I have data for demand and I can tell you that it is primarily for mobile phones only. Not PMP, not OLED TVs, not digital camera. The demand is not there yet.
Another reason why OLED is expensive: Approximately 50 percent of the materials are lost while being applied to the substrate. Yeah, it is like us asking questions whether Apple reuses aluminum when it makes those unibodies. How much recycling? Cost savings? Disposal mechanism?
Regarding cost of production, currently it is at around $1000/sq.m. They want to bring it to $200 sq.m. But I have data for demand and I can tell you that it is primarily for mobile phones only. Not PMP, not OLED TVs, not digital camera. The demand is not there yet.
Another reason why OLED is expensive: Approximately 50 percent of the materials are lost while being applied to the substrate. Yeah, it is like us asking questions whether Apple reuses aluminum when it makes those unibodies. How much recycling? Cost savings? Disposal mechanism?
Give me a break!!
This guy of Gizmodo is a joke, he can't be serious, from what he says:
"The device is tighter and more physically beautiful than the iPod Touch "
He must be kidding, right? It is definitely bigger than an iPod touch, more massive and thicker, The design of the iPod touch is way better and slicker, come one, is his taste so miserable? This zune is desperately ugly. I mean this brick shape, those weird wedges, those huge screws on the top, that's awful. Compare with that
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/gallery/#image2
If really it would be nicer than a Touch i would be the first to admit it, but come one, not that Zune....
"and it's got a better UI, the main menu's scrolling so natural through the swipe gestures. There's a little note on the side, under the volume toggle"Hello from Seattle." The power button is up top. "
I don't see anything that made it having a better UI than the Touch, what i see is basic rip-off of Apple's gestures implementation. You can scroll naturally on the Touch with the gestures, what's new here? Nothing, right, no one can say yes, there is simply nothing new.
What i also see on the Zune is an over use of animations with this text for the category (say photos) moving to the top and then zooming in and out like crazy as you navigate in the devise. You end up having few huge letters on the top of the screen and you don't know really why they are there.
The interface itself seems very poorly effective, look at the interface of the music player, i can't find words to describe how poor it is: this huge text on the top showing Artists and Playlists, the white big arrow to come back one step backward, the name of Artists or anything else being written with this flashy white on a black background, etc, etc. Overall, the interface is quite ugly and quite frankly a mess. So i can't believe that someone can claim that this thing has abetter UI than an iPod touch, that's crazy.
Again i would admit if it is really the case, but from what i see, that's far to be the case, plus this thing is not only having a awkward UI that is basically similar to today's zune, it is also running an OS that can't even be compared to OS X running on the Touch. In other words, the zune UI is more like an interface for a basic MP3 player as we know know from the iPod classics, not something to the level of the ipod Touch which is more today a mini computer which runs a very sophisticated OS. With this zune, Microsoft is not competing with the iPod touch, it is competing with the iPod classic.
Also not that the home screen design is really not done to make it work with a ton of apps, so forget this idea of having a ton of apps to use.
"The home button is nice and prominent, a bar rather than a round button on the Touch. It's smaller. And the accelerometer is more swift in responding to repositioning; images rotate very fast"
Yes now i am sure, he is speaking non sense, how can this bar and why it is better than round button? He first says it is prominent and after he says it is smaller, so what? What i see is that this button looks awfully ugly. And oh the good sense would indicate that round button are better as they fit better the shape of the area of the finger that you use to press. Bar shaped button have not been a good way to do it, as you can ask 100 people, most of them will say that they feel irritation of pressing such shaped buttons because they naturally feel uncomfortableness for pressing something that does not feel good on their finger.
Concerning the accelerometer, i don't see his point, on my iPod touch, things are instantaneous.
So the bottom of the line is that this guy is getting exited for nothing, this Zune has no innovative feature, no real killer feature that makes it interesting. This is a plain re-implementation of what Apple did on the iPod classic but with touch to make it sound that they want to compete with Apple's iPod touch.
This thing is a basic boring rip-off of ideas of others as Microsoft seems unable to come up with its own.
"But I would take this in a heartbeat"
Well, poor him!!!!
This guy of Gizmodo is a joke, he can't be serious, from what he says:
"The device is tighter and more physically beautiful than the iPod Touch "
He must be kidding, right? It is definitely bigger than an iPod touch, more massive and thicker, The design of the iPod touch is way better and slicker, come one, is his taste so miserable? This zune is desperately ugly. I mean this brick shape, those weird wedges, those huge screws on the top, that's awful. Compare with that
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/gallery/#image2
If really it would be nicer than a Touch i would be the first to admit it, but come one, not that Zune....
"and it's got a better UI, the main menu's scrolling so natural through the swipe gestures. There's a little note on the side, under the volume toggle"Hello from Seattle." The power button is up top. "
I don't see anything that made it having a better UI than the Touch, what i see is basic rip-off of Apple's gestures implementation. You can scroll naturally on the Touch with the gestures, what's new here? Nothing, right, no one can say yes, there is simply nothing new.
What i also see on the Zune is an over use of animations with this text for the category (say photos) moving to the top and then zooming in and out like crazy as you navigate in the devise. You end up having few huge letters on the top of the screen and you don't know really why they are there.
The interface itself seems very poorly effective, look at the interface of the music player, i can't find words to describe how poor it is: this huge text on the top showing Artists and Playlists, the white big arrow to come back one step backward, the name of Artists or anything else being written with this flashy white on a black background, etc, etc. Overall, the interface is quite ugly and quite frankly a mess. So i can't believe that someone can claim that this thing has abetter UI than an iPod touch, that's crazy.
Again i would admit if it is really the case, but from what i see, that's far to be the case, plus this thing is not only having a awkward UI that is basically similar to today's zune, it is also running an OS that can't even be compared to OS X running on the Touch. In other words, the zune UI is more like an interface for a basic MP3 player as we know know from the iPod classics, not something to the level of the ipod Touch which is more today a mini computer which runs a very sophisticated OS. With this zune, Microsoft is not competing with the iPod touch, it is competing with the iPod classic.
Also not that the home screen design is really not done to make it work with a ton of apps, so forget this idea of having a ton of apps to use.
"The home button is nice and prominent, a bar rather than a round button on the Touch. It's smaller. And the accelerometer is more swift in responding to repositioning; images rotate very fast"
Yes now i am sure, he is speaking non sense, how can this bar and why it is better than round button? He first says it is prominent and after he says it is smaller, so what? What i see is that this button looks awfully ugly. And oh the good sense would indicate that round button are better as they fit better the shape of the area of the finger that you use to press. Bar shaped button have not been a good way to do it, as you can ask 100 people, most of them will say that they feel irritation of pressing such shaped buttons because they naturally feel uncomfortableness for pressing something that does not feel good on their finger.
Concerning the accelerometer, i don't see his point, on my iPod touch, things are instantaneous.
So the bottom of the line is that this guy is getting exited for nothing, this Zune has no innovative feature, no real killer feature that makes it interesting. This is a plain re-implementation of what Apple did on the iPod classic but with touch to make it sound that they want to compete with Apple's iPod touch.
This thing is a basic boring rip-off of ideas of others as Microsoft seems unable to come up with its own.
"But I would take this in a heartbeat"
Well, poor him!!!!
Thank you. That's about what I thought.
And by the way, I noticed some mentions of Steve Jobs famous Reality Distortion field...
Since Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field goes back to 1981, that takes it back to before the Apple Mac even existed, back to the Apple ][ days!
A friend of mine finally got his book of short stories published that he largely wrote in the 1980s on my Apple ][e that he purchased from me, and although he no longer uses it anymore, the damn thing is STILL WORKING!
So, so much for reality distortion field... How many PCs from that era can you find that still work??? LOL
Oh, the book is hysterically funny too, it's called Believe You Me
Tell you the truth quite a few. Hardware is fairly robust and does not really fail that often. Big time when you remove a spinning hard disk. I was just last week working on some computer from the 80's. Let me tell you it was weird having to use DOS and try to move around that way but still was able work on the old OLD word perfect program.
So much for that counter argument.
Indeed. And what is more, you do not see anything about power consuption. To see this 'high def' it needs to be scaled down to the very low def screen. That takes more cycles than scaling down sd material. It takes more memory. And for actually using it mobile, it has no advantage.
We're back to the normal situation. Microsoft announces a product that will arrive in half a year or so, before that vaporware specs are being compared to actual products. Then it arrives and all the things that matter (like power consumption, actual possibilities, actual feel) are part of the comparison.
This product seems not very well thought out. HD on a iPod-like device and you need a HD-TV to actually see the HD? How portable is that? It just does not add up. Microsoft is still techno-oriented and not user-oriented. What is this, a portable Apple TV? And what use is that?
What I cannot understand is that Microsoft cannot understand. They have really smart people there. Probably the smart people are not in charge
I think it looks very nice. If zune worked with itunes i'd have got one ages ago. I'm a bit bored with the ipod and it's starting to look a bit tired. If you take a look at the current zunes next to the current ipods for me the zunes win hands down... admittedly some of this may be because it looks new and different.
Personaly the UI is great *and for the mention that it has 'the biggest font ever'.. ummm yes that's the design! Not only does that look modern but for usability of older people (not everyone who uses an mp3 player has perfect vizion) it would make the product much more usable.
Having said all this though... please what is with the touch screen obsession!? I really struggle to see the attraction of touch screen in what is now it's infancy. A few years when touch screen design has matured much more i might be in.
Personaly the UI is great *and for the mention that it has 'the biggest font ever'.. ummm yes that's the design! Not only does that look modern but for usability of older people (not everyone who uses an mp3 player has perfect vizion) it would make the product much more usable.
Having said all this though... please what is with the touch screen obsession!? I really struggle to see the attraction of touch screen in what is now it's infancy. A few years when touch screen design has matured much more i might be in.
What people often do not mention is that sitting in the RDF is actually an interesting drug-like experience. A bit like being slightly tipsy, it just feels good. Some Apple fans are also addicted to it.
Uncanny, it is.
The App Store was introduced some time after the introduction of the iPhone and iPod Touch. The fact that it has not been announced for the Zune HD does not mean that there will not be one. Remember that we now already have a blackberry app store and a nokia app store.
I'm fairly sure it's on its way.
When the iPod Touch and iPhone came out the App store didn't exist and they still did well.
The App store is predominantly full of utter tosh that is of no use to anyone. The limited number of things that could prove useful our outweighed my the mind numbing tripe that is also present.
If you ask me your point is moot.
I gotta say I don't actually think it's that bad looking. It could certainly use an improvement or two but I like how they're going for a more futuristic look. I'd be interested in seeing one in real-life and being able to make a more educated opinion about it though, it's never easy to see it all from images and video on the internet.
It's good that someone is trying to take on Apple within the mp3 player market. Apple has dominated it for so long...and a little competition can only be a bonus for their R&D.
and Apple's cinema HD displays and the new 24'' LED Display
What? No Apple display has HDMI, and they're all 16x10 displays so they don't display video properly either, just like the iPod touch and iPhone.
I got my first Mac in March of 2007. At first I liked it. But then the crashing started, the build quality started to show its face.. now I only keep OS X on my UniBody MacBook (second replacement for poorly built plastic MacBooks) in case there is a firmware update. As soon as the Core i5 and mainstream motherboards for it are out, I'm getting rid of the Mac and building my own system again and going back to Windows fully. OS X just isn't as good as Windows in many ways and Macs are far too overpriced.
Yay for competition.
The thing looks neat. Love the screen. However the UI can't touch Apple's, at least that one didn't. And what about multi-touch?
Any word on price?
One thing's for sure, though. Windows is overpriced garbage that is totally unstable.
The thing looks neat. Love the screen. However the UI can't touch Apple's, at least that one didn't. And what about multi-touch?
Any word on price?
One thing's for sure, though. Windows is overpriced garbage that is totally unstable.
It depends if it has Windows enough. Windows taxes the processor and RAM to fail to look pretty. Constantly crashing can't be too good for it either.
Yes, tapping multiple times to bet(sic) things to work
that sounds exactly like my iPod touch, its worse when I am trying to unlock it with the 'slider bar' and the bar seems to lose focus half way through the slide and go back only for me to repeat it 2-3 times before it finally unlocks.
Or those friggen buttons for me to purchase stuff from the itunes store, that never wants to work for me (like when I have to reaffirm that I want something, to which the button doesnt work and cancels the purchase...
It goes hand in hand with touch systems
Dear All,
Okay. I really like the Zune. It is just a matter of personal taste, but I like a more tight design (like the Zune and the Ademo laptop) then the "rounder" Apple design. However Apple designs neater and more over-thought. Apple would never design a devise with such an obvious screws on the back for example. Just a matter of detail.
It is a pitty that MS as such a big company can't be innovative. It is just another copy of Apple. I would much more respect MS if they came with something totally different and new out of their own. The whole idea of the new zune with the clean interface and the one "home" button is all Apples think work and innovation.
With best regards,
Bas
Okay. I really like the Zune. It is just a matter of personal taste, but I like a more tight design (like the Zune and the Ademo laptop) then the "rounder" Apple design. However Apple designs neater and more over-thought. Apple would never design a devise with such an obvious screws on the back for example. Just a matter of detail.
It is a pitty that MS as such a big company can't be innovative. It is just another copy of Apple. I would much more respect MS if they came with something totally different and new out of their own. The whole idea of the new zune with the clean interface and the one "home" button is all Apples think work and innovation.
With best regards,
Bas
"Sorry but if Steve's gone, we'll have idiotic stuff like the new ipod Shuffle which is practically useless... I'm still pissed about Apple taking out the remote controls in their pro models. Thanks a yahoo!
You seem to be under the misapprehension that Steve has 'gone', and that suddenly all the Apple execs are going mad. You do realise he would have approved the new shuffle and gone 'cool' or whatever. Even he (shock horror!) can make what some consider mistakes.
I love this forum...
I'll judge the Zune when I can manipulate it in my own hands. For now, there's nothing out there that has convinced me to give up my 1st Gen iPhone.
