iPod Takes Japan by Storm

conq writes "BusinessWeek reports on the soaring popularity of the iPod in Japan. From the article: 'iPod mania is alive and well in Japan -- one of the most competitive consumer-electronics markets on the planet. Despite an array of well-entrenched Japanese rivals, such as Sony and Matsushita, the iPod had cornered 51.3% of the digital-music player market as of the end of 2005, up from about 32% in 2004, according to research firm BCN. Sony was a distant second with 16.2%, while Panasonic grabbed just 8.2% of the market.'"

Didn't Understand the Hype

[dgb2n]

Until I owned one.

I've owned at least 6 or 7 different non-IPOD players including RIO's, RCA's, hard drive, flash based, you name it.

My wife bought me a Video Ipod this year and I was skeptical. "Why not save the $50 and get a non-Apple one.". After less than 3 months, I like it so well, I'm ready to trade her Rio Carbon in for a Nano just because its so easy to use. I generally consider myself tech savy (using Linux since 1997) but the interface just seems so slick, so smooth, so simple to use with one hand that I can't get over it. Just the fact that you can rate songs as you play them and have that transferred back into Itunes seemed to represent a higher level of integration (seamlessness) than I saw with any other player and client-side software combination.

Want to fast forward though a song? No problem. Couple of intuitive ways to do it. Love the album art. I used to download podcasts with a non-Itunes client and download to my other players. Completely simple with Itunes and the Ipod.

I'm not suprised. Apple just got it right.

Re:Didn't Understand the Hype

[Castar]

There are several features that the iPod is still missing. They're the reason I haven't gotten one. One is Ogg playback, just because I have a lot of music in Ogg. That's forgivable, and I can transcode if need be. However, the other one is simply unacceptable, and that's the lack of gapless playback. Workarounds like encoding all my music as one file are also unacceptable. I need true gapless playback for files that support it.

However, I might soon be buying an iPod, since the fine folks over at RockBox are busy porting their firmware over: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodPor t [rockbox.org]

That will solve the gapless issue and hopefully the Ogg issue, too. It'll also add a whole lot of cool features... When they finish that project, I might finally buy an iPod.