Well since I got an RA, I gifted myself with an mp3 player. The best part of gifting yourself is that you always get what you want :P.Anyways its a Creative Zen Sleek Photo. All my iPod lover friends found it blasphemous that I wasn't going for an iPod. I personally find the herd mentality quite sickening. I just go to CNet's top 10 list and check out the best stuff available. I then ignore downside listed due to any usability feature... weirder the interface, more comfortable I am with the product. Then I go to Campusi to check the cheapest deal available. It worked for my laptop, for my cell phone and I guess this player is not that bad either.
Frankly speaking, anybody who used iPod would find the interface totally non intuitive. Personally I think the abstraction( both hardware and software) is crappy. You need two wires to charge, It has a proprietary usb interface.... making it work on Linux is a headache (not tried it yet... but read lots of blogs about it). Also its an MTP device and not a universal mass storage device so you cant use it for storing data (well you have to partition it to use a partition as a data drive)... so why did I buy it??
It has a FM player, FM recorder, Audio recorder, FM preset and autoscanner. It also has support for custom equalizers. iPod has none of these features... plus this costed me $185 with tax and shipping. iPod costs around $250... just for their label and brand image. So even though this piece of machine is ugly... its powerful as hell. Something like Linux... I don't care about the GUI.. I just expect it to play songs and am pretty happy with it.
Tags:Life, Technology
"weirder the interface, more comfortable I am with the product"
ReplyDeleteHow wierd and stupid :)
And if you ask me, the market growth ipod got was for many reasons amongst which these I believe are the key
1. A shock that a computer manufacturer, believed to the Usability gurus, is coming out with a music player. This is what most normal user think.
2. For core music lovers who have always been on the look out for high end technology to suppliment their passion, the storage and quality is not a big shocker as they always had costly alternatives in the past in the form of Creative or Sony.
3. So ipod gained into the market very similar to what MS did with desktops. Like putting a reasonably good music player in almost every one pocket irrespective of kind of user they are.
4. More than all these, ipod put a lot of money to make ipod a lifestyle statement. They marketted it like, its cool to have an ipod and thus. Like its cool to hang out in our Forum or our brand names like Lee, Levis etc.
5. There are a bunch of other issues which we can discuss when we meet in person.
Sure... I will be in bangalore in december/january... will definitely meet u them...
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